


Family Road Trip

by geicogecko



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Eddie accidentally acquires Two Children, F/F, Fem Reddie, Fix-It of Sorts, Neibolt Richie uses ASL, They are girls becuase i am a LESBIAN and I SAY SO
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-02
Updated: 2020-08-15
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:35:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 45,371
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24498787
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/geicogecko/pseuds/geicogecko
Summary: Eddie should be dead. But she's not.The rotting porcelin doll and grimy little girl who have been living in Neibolt house for 27 years should have been destroyed with Pennywise. But they weren't.Now Eddie has to find her way to California to confess her love to Richie Tozier becuase she didn't manage to get her number before almost-dying. You know, if she doesn't kill the creepy, annoying 12 year old who looks like her first.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 57
Kudos: 117





	1. Eddie Wakes Up

_ If Eddie is being entirely honest she wasn’t expecting much to happen after she died. If you asked Myran or went back in time and asked her mother they’d probably wax poetic about heaven and her soul ascending to reunite with God, or if they were feeling particularly antagonizing, her soul descending to burn in hell with all the other homosexuals and sinners. _

_ However, the whole dancing demon clown situation sort of fucks with the whole ‘catholicism’ idea. She didn’t exactly have time to reanalyze her religious beliefs while fighting the manifestation of all of her fears, but suffice to say she wasn’t really expecting heaven or hell to open it’s gates for her.  _

_ That being said, opening her eyes to a giant fucking turtle was significantly more unexpected.  _

_ “What the fuck?”  _

_ It wasn’t exactly eloquent but it got the point across she supposed, and the nebulous turtle god crinkles its big eyes like it’s amused so she assumes she didn’t mess up too badly. _

_ It tilts its head, considering her up and down, she thinks it almost looks apologetic before nudging it’s nose against the center of her torso. _

**_Well, this is going to be interesting_ **

_ She doesn’t have time to process where the voice comes from, it reverberates throughout her body, thrumming through her veins like it was always meant to be there. It feels safe in a way she doesn’t think she’s ever felt before, like someone had wrapped all her fond memories up in a little ball of light and let it free inside her chest. _

_ She wants to feel like that forever. _

_ It draws its face back and the feeling lingers for just a second before slowly starting to leak away into the nothingness that surrounds the two of them. _

_ “Wait, no, please come back-” _

_ The turtle winks at her and the world explodes into white. _

The first thing Eddie registers as her brain begins to flicker online is that everything  _ aches _ , bone deep exhaustion burning through her muscles and settling in her joints.

Opening her eyes feels like far too much effort so she settles on taking account of her limbs, the feeling slowly returning to the soles of her feet and up her calves, arcing her spine, down her forearms and through her fingertips.

It hurts but it’s almost nice, relieving in a way she can’t quite place until she's lucid enough to realize that everything: the pain, the tingling in her limbs, the air filtering through her slightly parted lips, can only mean one thing.

_ She’s alive _ . Holy fucking  _ shit _ .

Somehow, no matter how inconceivable it might be, Eddie is _alive_.

She still feels muddled, like her whole head is just a big fucking bowl of scrambled eggs this-is-your-brain-on-drugs style; but she remembers with all the blurred clarity of a dream you can't quite recall once waking up, that there was an inbetween, something that took place after the fight  _ (and the pain and Richie and knowing she was dying and there was nothing anyone could do about it) _ and before whatever was happening right now. 

She remembers a vague safe feeling, flashes of something big and warm pressed to her front but she can’t place what had actually happened, but she’s alive and that’s really all that matters right now. 

“She’s fucking dead, Richie, come  _ on _ don’t be lame! Would you rather I dig into an  _ alive  _ human.” 

_ What. _

Her head is killing her and prying her eyelids open still feels painfully difficult but the voice echoes nearby and it startles her into action, the paranoia from being almost-murdered working itself to something closer to temporary adrenaline she may need to protect herself.

There is also the unquestionable interest based around the fact that the voice said  _ Richie _ and the unfounded hope that buries itself in her stomach in the two simple syllables.  _ Richie Richie Richie _ . Her memory of the fight is coming back in muddled fragments but she can recall Richie’s face in heartbreaking clarity, horrified and tear stained as she desperately pressed her jacket to Eddie’s chest. 

She hadn’t wanted to leave her, wanted to reassure her that everything was okay and make her laugh and.... God, she really wanted Richie right fucking now, she's the only one who could make any of this feel like it made sense.

So despite the effort she blinks her eyes open.

Richie is not there.

Instead, backlit by hazily filtered sunlight and standing over her are what looks to be two kids. One of them, short and slouching so she appears even shorter with a mane of frizzy hair obscuring her face (not that Eddie is really able to make out many of their features as she stumbles her way into consciousness) is arguing, seemingly by herself and apparently about whether or not Eddie is alive.

The other girl is tall and startling thin, standing with uncomfortably perfect posture that doesn’t seem to match the aggressive way she’s moving her hands around in the first girl’s face.

“Yeah,  _ uhuh _ , sure. Thats so fucking stupid!”

“Hello?” Neither seems to have noticed her waking up, far too involved in their one sided argument until she speaks. Short girl yelps, shoulders squaring up to her ears as she shoves the tall one behind her, shifting them into the light. Tall girl maneuvers into her friend’s line of sight just enough that she can see her bring her pointer to her lips before shoving it in the other girl’s direction, eyebrows raised and wiggling in triumphant mockery.

“Yeah okay, ‘you told me so’, haha very funny!”

_ Oh, she’s using sign language! _ Eddie realizes belatedly before the rest of her catches up to what she’s seeing and her thoughts suddenly veer off the track of rational thought and closer to the part of her brain that is just screaming and the general sentiment of  _ what the fuck _ .

Short girl is _ her _ , w ell, her at age twelve, she recognizes the irony in that, her subconciously calling herself short despite her constant war path that she isn't, but she doesn't quite have time to dwell on it. 

Because short girl is twelve year old her only she's _fucked up_. So insanely fucked up.

The messed up, childish her drops into a squat in front of her, leering with big yellowed eyes before poking at her cheek with a stained-black finger tip, the pain (and disgust) of having the open knife-stab wound she’d all but forgotten about prodded snaps her closer into reality.

“ _ Holy fucking shit! _ ” She backpedals instinctually, only stopping when her spine rams into something hard and solid behind her. Twelve year old Eddie doesn’t follow, just shoots a half confused, half amused look at the girl behind her and stands up, bouncing on the balls of her feet.

She’s barefoot, Eddie doesn’t quite know why that’s sticking out to her when it is possibly the least horrifying thing about the horrible little her with manic, flaxen eyes and a faded black stain trailing from her bottom lip all the way down the front of her t-shirt. 

But she’s also  _ barefoot _ and Eddie is realizing with dawning horror that they’re _ still in the sewer _ . It looks different from how she remembers, rubble piled high around them and beams criss crossing overhead where the roof has clearly caved in but it is unrguably still the cistern, or at least one of the tunnels close to it.

And little her isn’t wearing shoes as she saunters through gray water.  _ Fucking gross. _

“Are you done freaking out?” Kid Eddie asks, head cocked condescendingly, the girl behind her flicks the back of her head, “ _ Ow _ , what?” 

She signs something, sharp and pointed, and little Eddie rolls her eyes before turning back to her.

“She wants to know if you’re  _ okay _ .” She pouts her lips around the last word, muttering it derisively before jamming a thumb in her friend’s direction. The other girl waves, eyebrows drawn together slightly in concern. Eddie thinks she would appreciate the sentiment more if the girl wasn’t one of the scariest fucking things she’d ever seen, well, that wasn’t entirely accurate after the day she’d just had but she still ranked high enough on the list that the sight of her made Eddie's stomach lurch.

Eddie’s mom used to be obsessed with buying her porcelain dolls. Every birthday and Christmas she’d happily wrap up and gift her another one for the creepy little collection lining her bedroom’s bookshelf. 

Eddie had always hated them. 

She memorized the way the box looked under the wrapping paper just so she could open them first and set them out of the way, not that many of the other gifts her mother had bought her were any better. The dolls were always so unsettling, perfect looking and perfectly useless with beady little eyes that followed her when she walked past their designated shelves.

The girl in front of her was like those dolls, from her tugged all the way up knee socks to her white and pink shirtwaist dress up to the loosely tied bow in her hair, she was just one thousand times worse. 

It took her a second after swallowing the bile threatening to bubble up at the the maggot filled cracks in her cheeks and the thick black thread that laced her lips shut, to realize that she was Richie, albeit Richie at twelve and crossbred with _a_ _fucking porcelin doll_ , but regardless it still made her heart ache. 

Part of her thinks this is all some cosmic joke, that someone is just looking down at her and getting their sick kicks from her being taunted by disturbing little monsters in the form of her and her childhood crush, or maybe its a cosmic punishment, something to rub in the fact that she was too chickenshit to ever say anything to Richie before she fucking  _ died _ . 

Haha, really funny, Eddie isn’t laughing.

“ _ What _ are you?” Both the girls just sort of shrug which is... unnerving to say the very least. Richie (or the doll that looks like Richie, Eddie is so fucking confused) signs something quickly, eyebrows furrowed and the other Eddie nods

“She said that, like objectively, we’re what you were scared of as kids.” Eddie almost wishes they had stopped at shrugging, because the implications of what she had just said are fucking horrifying.

“No. No you fucking  _ aren’t _ . It is  _ dead,  _ they killed It, you shouldn’t  _ be here! _ ” She doesn't know how she's so sure that her friends killed the clown, by the time they'd been following through with her plan Eddie's already spotty memories really begin to taper off, swirled with the hazy in-and-out of her life force seeping away. But something in her knows they did it, it's one of few certainties she has right now and she grasps onto it like a life preserver.

“Yeah, well, here we fucking are.” Little Eddie snaps, black ooze slowly starting to drip from the corners of her mouth, she wipes her wrist over her chin before drawing her arms tightly over her chest. Eddie doesn’t know how she managed to piss off the manifestation of her childhood fears in one  _ very valid _ statement, but based on how little her is glowering, she fucked up somehow. 

She avoids the uncomfortable eye contact, dropping her attention on her stomach, her  _ whole, uninjured _ stomach, through the gaping hole in her shirt. God, that’s so  _ weird _ , she can't focus on it too long before the dull ache that had been sitting behind her temples makes its presence known. 

Richie’s jacket lays forgotten, tangled around her legs from where it must have fallen in her scramble to get away from the little Eddie. She picks it up, letting it untwist in her hands, it’s splattered with dried blood and filthy. She tugs it on anyway, taking comfort in the well worn leather and the vague reassurance of knowing it belonged to Richie. Something cold presses itself against her exposed, unblemished skin before she can zip the jacket up to cover it and she startles, looking up into the blank face of Doll Richie, her jointed hand prodding curiously at her stomach.

She lifts her hand away to poke her pointer at Eddie, shaking her head as she draws her hands back, one facing up and the other down before flipping them over, touching cupped hands together with the backs of her fingers and overturning them until the palms face Eddie. Her porcelain fingers clink when they touch, it's not a bad sound, gentle and entirely unavoidable but it makes Eddie's skin crawl with the extra reminder of how _wrong_ everything is. 

She signs through the same motions again when Eddie doesn't give her enough of a reaction, foggy grey eyes surprisingly expressive, Eddie can understand at the very least that she’s confused about something, but that is really where her comprehension ends. 

“I… I’m sorry I don’t-” She shakes her head uselessly and the doll’s face drops, Eddie can swear she sees her roll her eyes before aggressively pointing at Eddie shaking her head ‘no’ and slashing her pointer across her throat so theatrically Eddie feels like she should be lolling her tounge out the side of her mouth (and then feels stupid when she looks down at her sealed lips and remembers why they're playing fucking charades). 

“Oh… I’m not sure how I’m not dead. I should be.” She has a feeling that wasn’t sign language but she at least gets the sentiment this time.

“Yeah, you _should_. Come  _ on,  _ Richie. She’s alive, whatever, lets  _ go. _ ”

“Go  _ where _ ? No offense but you’re fucking disgusting, no one is gonna think you’re human.” She snaps, nerves frayed and scattered brain desperately trying to catch up with whatever the fuck is happening right now. She knows as she says it that it was uncalled for, they're scary but other than being vaugley rude they really haven't done anything to her, but she is unsure if she has to apologize for insulting the extensions of a demon clown who just so happen to look like children. Her question is answered for her when she looks up and little Eddie is preening, apparently terribly flattered. Doll Richie flips her off but she really doesn't seem too offended either.

“Well, you guys broke our house. Can’t exactly stay here.”

“What do you mean broke your house?” 

“You fucking  _ broke it _ , it’s  _ gone! _ ” Eddie can feel herself getting defensive at the frustrated accusation as the kid closes in on her. . 

Objectively Eddie knows she should stop fighting her, that more or less she's fighting with herself and all that won't end well, they'll just keep ramping eachother up into someone explodes sooner rather than later, but it’s been a  _ day _ and it’s so much easier to just pack all anger and fear into insults and throw them at her closest problem.

“I didn’t do  _ anything _ , look  _ kid _ -” 

Doll Richie slams her little foot into a puddle, splashing gray water over both of them to get their attention, stiff features scrunched as angrily as they could be. Eddie chokes in disgust, swiping her hands uselessy at her already filthy skin. She _knows_ that she is coated in sewer water, it's hard to ignore the way she can feel it soaking through her pants and the stiff film it’s dried into across her skin, and the extra droplets just push her even closer to the edge. The other Eddie, however, cackles delightedly, slamming her own feet ankle deep in the puddle. 

Richie seems to decide that the distraction is the perfect oppertunity to grab Eddie’s arms and yank her up. A wave of vertigo washes over her as she stumbles to her feet, aching legs shaking with the effort it takes to stand, without meaning to she leans herself fully against the doll, who stumbles, porcelain joints letting out a horrible grinding noise before her knees buckle, sending them both tumbling.

“Holy fucking shit!” Eddie can hear her counterpart yelp over the ringing in her ears before she's on top of them and tugging Richie up by her elbows from under Eddie; looking her over and grumbling in a way that sounds almost fond that she’s a fucking idiot as the doll swats her off. 

Richie gestures between the two uselessly and the other Eddie screws up her eyebrows, sticking out a blackened tongue before glancing down at her.

“ _ Fine _ , okay, get up and _I guess_ I’ll show you what I mean by you destroying our house.”

Getting out of the sewers is an embarrassingly difficult process, she’s not  _ that  _ old, despite how much joy Little Eddie seems to garner from teasing her about it, but apparently undying has some side effects and climbing through the rubble fucking  _ hurts _ .

Doll Richie also seems to have some trouble, stiff joints creaking when she tries to manoeuvre herself through smaller spaces, the only difference being Little Eddie backtracks to help her. She just laughs at Eddie, leaving her to painstakingly heave herself up the beams as she skitters ahead again.

Eddie thinks, just for a moment, that she doesn’t remember being so much of a shithead as a child. As she goes to mutter the statement to the other Eddie’s quickly retreating form she can almost hear her friends laughing at her, cheeks suddenly burning even though no one actually witnessed her mistake, she probably got called shithead enough that it could have constituted as a nickname and now she fully understands why. If she ever managed to get herself out of here she may need to issue some extremely belated apologies.

She manages, just barely, to pull herself onto the grass after far too long. 

If she was looking she might realizes how the twisted version of her has buried her hands into the dirt grinning crookedly at the grass and glancing wide eyed at their surroundings like she'd never seen the outdoors before or how the doll-like Richie is laid out, hands primly folded on her stomach, fully basking in the sunlight that glints off her glasses, just the very corners of her mouth tilted slightly up.

But she’s a bit too focused on the collapsed pit where Neibolt used to be. 

“Yeah, okay, I see what you mean.” She chokes and little her snorts, grumbling something rude before refocusing on the grass, rubbing a piece between her thumb and forefinger and delighting in the green smear it leaves behind.

Neibolt House is  _ gone _ , the rubble is there, some collapsed support beams that Eddie had just scaled, but there is just a hole in the ground where the house was supposed to be, encircled with shiny yellow caution tape that had already begun to sag off it’s posts. 

She is hit suddenly with the realization that her friends are gone, that other than her and the kids behind her she's alone. The unnatural silence that surrounds them is deafening, the abscence of something that _should_ be there . Something is off, the caution tape is old, no one is here, and the air is far brisker than she’d expect from an early Derry autumn. 

How long had she been down there?

The Townhouse, she needs answers and she needs to get to the Townhouse to get them. Maybe, _maybe_ she’s just being paranoid and it's only been a few hours, her friends are still here and everything is going to be okay. 

“Thats fucking stupid. They’ve been gone for weeks.” Little Eddie sounds loudly behind her.

“What?”

“You were mumbling to yourself, all your friends fucked off weeks ago.” It feels like someone poured ice water down the back of her shirt.  _ Fuck _ .

The Losers had been gone for  _ weeks _ . All her friends think she’s dead and the idea makes her heart twist painfully. 

Her husband probably thinks she’s dead too, but for some reason that makes her feel far more relieved then upset. She wonders if this is what it feels like to be truly free, the clown is dead so it can't control her and Myran thinks she's dead so he can't control her either. It feels sort of fucked that she's ranking them on the same level, clown who eats children and her horrible husband. Ex husband, probably, she's not too clear on the details of what happens to your marriage when you die and then come back to life but what Myran doesn't know won't hurt him and not informing him of the 'coming back to life' part seems easier.  Dying is one way to get a divorce with little to no paperwork or conflict. 

She wonders what poor bastard had to call Myran and tell him she wasn’t coming home, she hopes it wasn't one of her friends, that was probably a shit show of fake tears and screaming she wouldn't want to inflict on anyone, especially not the people she cared for.

Her sudden, overwhelming onslaught of relizations leads to her flopping in between the two kids onto the grass, hands over her eyes and unsure if the tears soaking into her palms are happy or sad at this point. Neither of them point out that she’s crying which she appreciates even though little Eddie giggles when she lets out an audible sob and Richie lays a cold porcelain hand on her shoulder that is theoretically supposed to be comforting but all in all just reminds her of how fucked this all is. She withdraws her hands eventually and Eddie can hear the clink of her fingers touching together, it feels rude not to look even though she’ll have no clue what the girl is saying but she thinks she’s allowed to be a little rude right now. And even if she's not then the kid can deal.

“Richie says it was kind of a shitty move for your wife to leave your body down there. You’re annoying though, I kind of get it.” Her child voice informs her and Eddie finally drags her hands off her face, turning her head in the girl’s direction. She seems to take great joy in the yelp that escapes Eddie’s lips when she opens her eyes to find the grimy, slime smeared face directly next to her own. 

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Your Richie just left you there.” It’s not that she doesn’t know already but  _ god  _ that hurts to think about, so she doesn’t, choosing instead to focus on the much less important part of her previous sentence.

“We’re… we aren’t married.” The atmosphere around them loses any sense of bizarre casualty, air crackling with tension. The younger Eddie is glaring down at her, mouth opening and closing like she's seraching for an insult or remark before screwing up her face in hopeless confusion. Richie pokes her shoulder hard to get her attention before wiggling her jointed ring finger directly in Eddie’s face.

“Oh, no that’s not-” She sits up, hands drifting to her wedding ring and twisting it nervously, pointedly ignoring the looks they’re shooting her and how her cheeks are burning, “My husband Myran, or my ex husband now-”

“Husband?” Little her looks disgusted, saying it in tandem with some bewildered signing from Richie she’d bet money probably meant the same thing.

“Yes?”

“Jesus fucking christ, no wonder we’re still here. You’re probably still scared of us or some bullshit.” She glowers, sludge starting to make its way down her chin with a sudden intensity, she pushes herself away from her on the ground and storms next to Richie, manhandling her easily into her lap. Richie doesn't look away from Eddie, murky eyes startlingly disappointed as they fixate on her rings.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Little Eddie lets out a muffled scream into Richie’s shoulder, when she pulls her face away, the other girl’s dusty white sleeve is soaked in the stringy black goop, “She’s fucking hopeless.”

"About _what_?"

"No! Fuck you! I'm done! I'm not explaining!" Her words slur with slime.

Richie looks between both of them from where she's propped crookedly in the other girl's lap, pale cheeks flushing in a frustrated blush before slamming her feet into the grass until she's sure they're both looking at her and grabbing her Eddie's face, pressing their lips together. 

It’s an awkward looking kiss, Richie clearly can’t reciprocate all that well with her mouth stitched shut and the other Eddie looks suprised, like they don't impulsivly kiss often, the goo bubbling from her mouth seeping in between their chins. They pull apart after a second too long, looking over at her expectantly. 

“ _ What? _ ” She chokes, not that there are really many ways of interpreting what she just saw. Richie buries her face in her skirt, blowing air harshly through her nose.

“We’re the embodiment of everything you guys were terrified of when you were kids, we’re lesbians dipshit.” Little Eddie informs her, pressing another kiss to one of the maggot filled holes in Richie's cheek, probably for emphasis but Eddie can't help but feel it's mostly just to make her gag.

It all makes sense, really, when she thinks about it. The kid version of herself is everything that would terrify her as a child, visibally infected with a sinful, terrible disease, from the viscous sludge oozing from her lips like vomit to her sickly pallor and eyes ringed with dark circles, she's the exact picture her mother used to paint of filthy, horrible lesbians.

Her stomach lurches. That wasn’t just something that would terrify her as a child, it’s something that would terrified her a few weeks ago at forty, which is honestly depressing. It’s not that she’s magically fully comfortable with her sexuality now, it’s still scary and confusing, but dying evidently puts some things into persepective (that and watching the twisted child version of herself make out with the twisted child version of the woman she still has a crush on 22 years after last seeing her).

Things like how short life is, and how desperately she wants to kiss her Richie Tozier right now. 

Richie Tozier who watched her die, held her jacket against her gaping chest wound and sobbed over her failing body. Richie Tozier who thinks she’s still dead and probably went back home to LA and _definitely_ didn’t leave her number with Eddie’s fucking  _ corpse _ just on the off chance that Eddie _raised from the dead_ weeks later, fully prepared to confess her decades old love for her. 

Eddie hugs her arms around herself, drawing the jacket closed at the zipper and running her fingers over the broken in material.

She needs to find her.

“Hey! Where the fuck are you going?” She ignores the stammered cries from her younger self, standing up and starting down the road. After a moment two sets of feet slam on the asphalt behind her, matching her own steps with the rapid, dull thud of bare feet and the clack of thick soled mary janes. A pair of warm, dirt smeared arms wrap around her middle and lurch her forcefully still.

“Holy shit, let me  _ go! _ ”

“No! Where the fuck are you going?” She doesn’t release her hold around Eddie’s stomach, keeping her held still and yelling against the back of Richie’s jacket. Doll Richie is standing in front of her, arms crossed and one eyebrow cocked almost challengingly.

“I need to find Richie!” The arms slowly unwind, pulling away from her body, little Eddie quickly steps in front of her, effortlessly pushing her Richie to the side. The doll barely looks phased by it, hands settling on her hips. It’s like the world's creepiest two person gang consisting of two twelve year old girls.

“What about your  _ husband _ .” She sneers the word like it’s an insult, and well… knowing Myran it very well could be. She really wishes it hadn’t taken  _ dying  _ to realize it.

“Fuck him.” They both exchange a look that holds an entire conversation, communicating fully through prolonged eye contact and head tilts before a hesitant, too wide grin makes its way across the smaller Eddie’s face.

“Well then, maybe you aren’t entirely hopeless after all,” Her smile droops a little on one side, “Take us with you.” It isn’t a request, it’s a demand that Eddie is not planning to meet. 

“Yeah, no, I’m not going to do that.” This is already going to be difficult enough, without adding two monster children into the mix, she can’t even think about everything that is working against her without her chest feeling tight.

Edith Kaspbrak is most likely legally declared dead which really should be where her list of ‘fucked up issues with my current situation’ ends. But she _also_ has to find her way across the fucking country, with no car, a budget of exactly zero dollars, and a wardrobe consisting of a blouse with a gaping hole in the center and one jacket steeped in _her own blood_ and _sewer water._ And, of course, to top it all off the whole thing motivating her is goddamn  _ true love  _ like she’s a shitty little protagonist in a terrible romantic comedy, except nothing here is funny.

“Where the fuck are we supposed to  _ go  _ then?” It was a fair question, they couldn’t exactly live normal lives the way they looked and they were kids so it wasn’t like they could do some shady under the counter string pulling to get an apartment no questions asked or something, not that Eddie would know how to do that even as an adult, but she had a feeling it’d be much simpler to figure out now than it would have been at twelve. But as guilty as it makes her feel, none of that changes the fact that they’re not coming.

“Look, I’m sorry, best of luck, but I’m not taking you with me!”

“We’re basically your responsibility! You’re the only reason we exist  _ and _ you destroyed our house, so whether you like it or not we’re fucking coming with you!”

“ _ No you aren’t! _ ” She makes the mistake of looking away from her younger self, all frothing black goo and wild eyes, to the Richie look alike behind her. She has some devastating mix of resigned pleading written over her blank features as she circles an open hand on her chest, and she's still so obvously not human but Eddie can't help but feel some sort of mortfied shame at turning her away. The smaller Eddie follows her line of sight, lips quirked.

“She’s saying if you don’t let us come with you she’ll kill you.” Her tone is dripping with false casualty, a stained grin slowly spreading across her features when Eddie stumbles a step back. Richie’s hand drops and her eyes widen comically before she begins to shake her head in a fervent flurry of fluffy black hair and panic, whacking the other girl’s arm  _ hard _ and slamming her pointer and middle finger against her thumb, the slap of porcelain on skin and glass fingers clicking together ringing dully through the silent street. The other girl shoves her off, looking almost pained as she turns back to Eddie and grinds out: “Fine, you piece of  _ shit.  _ She was saying... please.” 

Eddie studies both their faces, trying to pick out the lie from the other Eddie’s rolled eyes or Richie’s earnest expression, the edges of her mouth pulled in an almost painful looking smile.

She brings her open hand to her chest again and circles it.  _ Please. _

Unfourtunatley for Eddie Kaspbrak, she had never been very good at saying no to Richie Tozier.


	2. Eddie Procures a Van

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eddie solves some problems, breaks the law, has several panic attacks, and finds some things out about her new travel companions, all in one day.

She understood that the reason her friend’s didn’t just leave her things abandoned in her room after her death was because they loved her. 

It’d be shitty if they had, like a weird abandoned shrine in her memory that consisted of pill containers, hypoallergenic face washes, and a truly pathetic handmade, laminated schedule for when she had to take which medication with all her allergies listed on the back in Myran’s handwriting. 

She understood that, really.

However, right now she sort of wants to punch all her lovely, well meaning friends in the face. Or scream. 

One just so happens to be significantly simpler than the other so she flops onto her hastily made bed (part of her, the part that can still think rationally, wonders who made it, because she hasn’t seen any fucking staff in the time she was there before and she still doesn’t), shoves her face in a pillow, and  _ screams.  _

She had expected this entirely. She was fully prepared for the incredibly likely possibility that her friends wouldn’t leave her things, that she’d need to do this trip on an insanely tight budget of zero dollars, but the full weight of this situation was really starting to crush her. 

She didn’t have a phone, it was probably just another piece of trash in the bottom of a Derry sewer at this point, and even if she had it she didn’t have Richie’s number, she didn’t have  _ any _ of the Losers numbers, and she wasn’t about to call  _ Myran _ .

She didn’t have any money. She didn’t have a car. She didn’t have a clue where she was going except the vague memory of Richie joking that their “lil ol’ Trashmouth is living it up in LA now!” 

“Are you dying?” The other Eddie wandered into the room, looking up and down the water stained walls with dull interest. 

“Sorry, didn’t mean to freak you out.”

“Oh, you  _ didn’t _ . People screaming isn’t scary, actually it was pretty fucking funny, but it’d be inconvient if you died before you could get us out of here.” She unconsciously files away ‘people screaming isn’t scary’ before absently raising her middle finger, face flopping back into the pillow.

“Where’s the other one?” She’d told them to stay put in the lobby unless, by some bizarre instance, someone actually comes to the inn, which knowing Eddie’s recent luck seems more than likely. In that case they should book it and hide somewhere.

It’s not that she’d entirely thought they’d listen to her, she just figured they’d at least stay  _ together  _ (she knows that if  _ she _ was dating any iteration of Richie Tozier, especially one so  _ fragile  _ that they were _ porcelain _ , she’d never let her out of her fucking sight).

“You told her to stay still, she’s fucking good at that.” That makes Eddie look up, the way she snaps it, all bitter and suddenly slime-slurred, she can’t read her expression right away, face screwed up and lined with something that almost looks like guilt but really it’s mostly just anger. She doesn’t push, even though it feels like she should, even though that sort of feels like a cry for help. She’s not stable herself right now to help with whatever the fuck is going on with the spawn of an intergalactic child eater.

Instead she asks: “You didn’t happen to notice while you were down there if there was a computer in the lobby?”

All the anger drains into confusion, for a minute anything intimidating slips from her demeanor until she regains her footing and looks unnecessarily frustrated.

“What?” 

“A computer?” It takes an infuriating round of back and forth for Eddie to realize that just maybe these demon clown children have just maybe never seen  _ modern technology _ .

When they get downstairs Richie is still sitting stiffly on the couch where she left her, looking more doll-like than before, Eddie can practically see her shrunk down and settled on a shelf gathering dust. It’s terribly unsettling.

There  _ is _ a computer, but it’s ancient. Eddie wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the same one that was there when she was a kid. The massive box whirs when it comes to life, an annoyingly dusty sound that, apparently, beckons her counterpart, dragging the other girl over to watch as the computer wheezes like it’s having an asthma attack just from the effort it took to run.

Richie’s address is startlingly easy to find. Like, it’s freaking Eddie the fuck out that all it took was a google search to find a gross website called  _ hotcelebrityinfo.com _ with straight up directions to Richie’s home where she  _ lives _ .

Anyone could just look her up and rob her or attack her or just be generally creepy outside her home and they wouldn’t even need to  _ try _ .

But, whatever, it makes things easier for her. She avoids looking at the little picture of Richie in the corner of the website for an impressive two minutes before she caves and just lets herself  _ stare _ . It barely looks like her, well maybe it does but she just looks so  _ fake _ . It’s definitely from a few years ago, she looks young and beautiful and miserable despite how wide she’s grinning. Her dress is too tight, too short, and Eddie wants to go back in time to wrap her up in a fucking blanket from how uncomfortably she’s holding herself, hair falling around her shoulders like a poorly straightened barrier hiding her bare shoulders. There is a caption under it, something about Rachel Tozier looking  _ hot as fuck _ and a series of disgusting comments at the bottom of the page wondering  _ what that trashmouth can do ;) _ .

Eddie feels nauseous.

She prints the address and directions as quickly as she can before reporting the website and closing the page. 

Richie had looked much prettier when Eddie had seen her in person at dinner before everything went to shit, comfortable and laughing and looking more like herself than the Richie on screen with her false smile and tiny dress.

The kids seem fascinated by the equally old printer as it slowly churns out pages and she leaves them too it.

Now that one problem is solved she is painfully aware of the grime coating her whole body and she needs to get it  _ off _ . When she thinks about the cut in her cheek it stings like it’s all of a sudden infected, she knows that's unrealistic, that it hadn’t hurt until she thought about the possibility of it even hurting, but she needs to get clean right fucking now.

She doesn’t anticipate the way her heart lodges in her throat when she closes the bathroom door, the way it stays there even when she checks behind the shower curtain and locks the little window, just waiting for a man she knew was dead to leap out and stab her again. She rationalizes that if she could come back to life  _ just maybe  _ Henry Bowers could too, so she can pretend she isn’t crazy for worrying about it.

(Even if deep down she knows the situations are painfully different, that there is far more magic involved in death via clown claw and death via comedian with an axe).

She undresses on autopilot, slipping her rings off and placing them on the counter with a click that sounds so loud in the silence it makes her flinch. She folds her filthy clothes, placing them on the toilet seat (folding Richie’s jacket far more carefully and placing it neatly on the little stool in the corner, as far from the shower as she can, because she doesn’t want the water to ruin it.) (She knows it’s already ruined, it doesn’t matter.)

It’s a shitty shower. 

The Townhouse doesn’t have complementary soap or shampoo or anything so she’s barely getting clean. She tries to substitute pressure for the lack of soap, rubbing her bare palms against her arms until the skin feels raw and shines too pink under the bathroom lights. Her cheek  _ burns _ as she stands on her toes and flushes through the hole with the lukewarm, weak stream of water from the shower head. She wants to douse it in a whole bottle of hydrogen peroxide, she wants to go get stitches, she wants to not have a  _ hole in her cheek in the first place  _ but it really doesn’t matter what she wants. Water  _ needs _ to be enough but it sure as hell doesn’t feel like it.

When she steps out she barely feels better. 

Her hair falls in tangled tendrils around her face, so clean it’s squeaky when she combs her fingers through it and her skin feels too dry yet still soaked in gray water all at the same time.

But it’s better than nothing.

She sort of wants to cry as she slides on the same clothes she’d had on before, like she’s reversing the whole point of showering by marinating in the filth of the same pants and shirt she had  _ died in _ . It’s not like she really has much of a choice though. 

She considers her rings on the counter. It feels like they’re staring at her from where she’s seated on the closed toilet, stewing in self pity and bandaging her cheek with the meager supplies found in a truly lackluster first aid kid under the sink. It feels wrong to put them on, she doesn’t want to be married to Myran anymore and he thinks she’s dead so she really has no obligation to. 

_ But _ they’re also probably expensive and it feels stupid to just leave them here.

She spends a good fifteen minute spaced out, examining the wedding ring with it’s ugly little diamond chips around the white-gold band and prodding at the princess cut stone in the center of her engagement ring, unsure of how anyone would be able to tell if it wasn’t just glass, when she realizes selling them is an option and feels like possibly the stupidest person on on the planet.

In her defense, she’s sure dying probably fucks with your ability to think things through.

**-**

Derry only has one pawn shop, it’s been there since they were kids; the guy who ran it had always been notorious for being unfriendly (and for scamming people but that sort of came with the territory of most pawn shops). She’d never been allowed in when she was younger so she couldn’t be  _ sure _ it was the same guy but based on the scowl the ancient looking man behind the counter levels her with, she could wager a guess. 

He simply cocks an eyebrow at her blood stained, filthy clothes and doesn’t ask questions before taking her rings, which she appreciates even if the carefully practiced mask of disinterest he’d slotted on as he looked at the diamond on her engagement ring was giving her fucking heart palpitations.

“Look, for both of these I could  _ maybe  _ offer…” He trails off again, hard eyes softening just a little as he looks her up and down. She isn’t sure if she should be grateful or offended that she apparently looks so pitiable that a man infamously known town wide as an asshole feels bad for her, she settles on vaguely depressed but not surprised. He sets both rings down on the glass countertop.

“Those your kids?”

“What?” He nods behind her, when she turns she can just see a frizzy tangle of brown hair and a poof of black curls duck below the sill of the display window, “ _ Motherfuckers! _ ”

The guy looks almost amused for a second, letting his lips quirk, before schooling his features back into something more business appropriate.

“I’ll give you a thousand for the both of them. Deal?” 

Eddie had figured she’d be harder to scam into an unfair deal because she worked in finances, as she stares at the rings and the man’s outstretched had, however, she realizes a career in analyzing risks really didn’t do jack shit when she had no fucking clue how much wedding rings sold for in the first place. The guy could have decided to cut her a break or he could be entirely ripping her off and she would be none the wiser.

“Deal.” She winces slightly as his damp fingers wrap around her own, it’s a little hypocritical considering her hands have definitely been grosser in the past 24 hours than his have probably ever been in his life but he doesn’t seem to mind, shaking firmly once before handing her a wad of hundred dollar bills.

“They aren’t my kids, by the way.” He just barely lifts an eyebrow and says ‘Oh?’ like he doesn’t care whatsoever, which he definitely doesn’t because why the hell would he? Eddie looks down and carefully stacks the bills into a neat little pile so she doesn’t need to make eye contact, heat spreading from her cheeks to the tips of her ears.

“Is that all?” He pockets the rings, eyes darting to the display window for a second before he turns his back to her and begins to fiddle with the cash register, a clear dismissal despite his question.

“Actually…” Her mind lingers on the two girls snooping under the window and the 3107.6 miles inbetween her and Richie Tozier, “Do you happen to know anyone who is selling a car?”

He does, apparently, even if he rolls his eyes and rudely reminds her that she’s in a  _ pawn shop _ . He informs her boredly that there was some “asshole” a few blocks away who had a “hunk of junk” parked in his yard for weeks. He scribbles the address and number on the back of a crumpled receipt that gets unearthed from his pocket and waves her out the door when she tries to thank him.

Eddie and Richie are sitting on the ground outside the shop, hands interlaced in between them and bumping experimentally into the brick wall behind them, rhythmically sending dull clanks down the street. 

The doll’s ball joint knees are mostly hidden under her skirt from where her legs are neatly tucked underneath her. She’s pressed politely against the wall, small and unobtrusive, which is at least  _ something _ even though her other jointed limbs and messed up face are out in the open; unlike the other Eddie who is sprawled out like she’s  _ trying _ to trip someone, blowing disgusting slime bubbles in between her lips like it’s bubble gum before popping them with her free hand and swallowing it back. Eddie thinks she might puke.

“ _ Hey assholes _ , I told you to stay at the Townhouse.” Richie has the decency to at least look embarrassed, ducking her head and circling a closed fist on her chest, “Please?”

Other Eddie looks confused for just a second before glancing over and correcting her.

“Closed fist means she’s saying sorry.” She grinds out ‘sorry’ like it physically pains her but Richie nods earnestly before bowing her head again.

“Did anyone see you?”

“Probably.” She takes a moment to scream into her palms until she hears her childish laughter sound from below her, a quick glance at Richie’s shaking shoulders and squinty eyes tells her she’s laughing too, at least to the best of her ability.

She flips them both off before setting down the sidewalk to the address the pawn shop man had given her, gesturing for them to follow and not looking back to make sure they do. (And not only because she can hear their footfalls and one sided bickering behind her so she knows they’re right there). 

She supposes it doesn’t really matter if someone saw them, anyway, they’re getting the fuck out of Derry as soon as possible, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t still make her anxious.

The pawn shop guy was right, the man selling the car, which is actually a  _ van _ that looks like it’s about to fall apart, is an asshole who asks significantly more questions about why she looks like she’s been curb stomped into a sewer grate, which Eddie knows is fair enough but it doesn’t exactly endear her to him. That, and the frankly absurd amount of money he was charging for a  _ frankly  _ shitty van makes her feel significantly less bad about what she’s about to do. 

Not that she doesn’t still feel cripplingly guilty when she forces a smile and asks him if she can take it for a test spin, catches the keys he tosses at her, and drives away, fully aware that it was the last time she was ever going to see him. 

If he called the cops on an “Edith Kasp… Kasper, yeah, Edith Kasper is my name… yes of course I’m  _ sure _ ” the closest he’d get was an obituary for an Edith Jones, whose maiden name just so happened to be Kasp _ brak _ . 

She’d always fucking hated the last name Jones, Kaspbrak was much better (and, well, if she thought Tozier was  _ even better  _ that was between her and a woman who thought she was dead… for now at least).

She pulled up a block away where she’d told the kids to wait, honking until their nasty little faces popped out from behind (and  _ inside _ ) the dumpster her counterpart had gleefully chosen as their hiding spot.

“Get the fuck in  _ right now _ .” She can hear them fumble with opening the back of the van, nervous energy funneling into her leg which was bouncing so hard against the bottom of the steering wheel she was sure she’d have a line shaped bruise across her knee next time she checked.

“What the fuck is this?!” The other Eddie crows the second they manage to get inside sounding delightedly confused.

“Got us a van, close the door so we can fucking  _ go _ !” She’d sort of been telling herself it wasn’t stealing, she really had no basis to that claim because it was unequivocally fucking stealing, like dictonary-definiton-taking-without-permission stealing. 

“Did you steal it?” She glances back, the other Eddie is dry mouthed and beaming in anticipation, tangled with Richie on the poorly installed gray carpeting like they’d both just fallen in, the doll’s eyes crinkled and brows raised in the way Eddie has managed to determine in the very short time she’s known her, is her way of smiling. 

“Yeah, I did.” Her younger self whoops loudly, Richie slamming her palms against the floor in supportive, dull clanks. Eddie slams her foot on the gas.

Her guilt doesn’t fade but it stops spiking, settling in her stomach with all her other anxieties about what she’s about to do and did before and  _ dying _ , despite herself she feels a grin slowly make its way across her face.

Maybe this won’t be so bad.

**-**

It’s bad.

Eddie had never wanted kids, she was a self proclaimed baby hater. Not that she  _ hated babies _ like some sort of psychopath but she never knew how to hold them, how to answer little children’s endless questions, never knew when their tears were real or fake and what she was supposed to do about them. 

Myran had made her try to have kids of course, over and over and over; and when the doctors finally told her she was physically incapable of it he’d dragged them to a religious couples retreat to try and pray for forgiveness for whatever atrocious sins Eddie had committed that made her barren (apparently that ‘sin’ what fighting an intergalactic child eating clown when she was twelve, which, shockingly enough, hadn’t been brought up by the priest). 

She’d spent that week mentally celebrating next to her angry husband as they sat through sermon after sermon amongst weeping motherless women and  _ their  _ angry husbands.

The retreat had managed to have the opposite effect it was intended to and she found herself more thrilled than ever that she could never have children.

This experience, however, is somehow making her want kids  _ even less  _ than she already did, and she didn’t think that was possible.

“Stop opening the back!”

“Yeah Richie! Stop opening the back!” The other Eddie cackled, making no move to close the doors which, admittedly, Richie  _ had _ opened and was laying by the edge of, head resting on her arms as she watched the road under them rush by. 

Eddie is flopped on her back next to her, watching the blurred tree line as she gargled slime, swishing more and more obnoxiously each time she’s snapped at to stop. Richie raises an arm and flips them both off more daintily than Eddie knew was possible before resettling back down to look. An alarm on the dashboard beeps angrily for Eddie to close the doors.

“ _ Close them! _ ” They do not. 

She swerves off the road, taking a slightly sick joy in the startled choking noises the other sputters as she tries not to swallow her mouthful of goo.

“ _ I should have fucking left you in Derry. _ ” Her twelve year old face beams a slimy, blackened smile at her when she unbuckles and storms to the back.

“Oh but wouldn’t you just be  _ so bored _ all alone?” She mocks, lips pursed around a baby voice and Eddie has to focus all her energy on the fact that she’s twelve so she doesn’t punch her.

“No. I’d actually have some  _ peace and quiet _ .”

“I think you’re delusional then, because Richie’s quiet all the time, it's literally what she’s best at.” Richie palms her face and shoves her away, signing something one handed, ponting at Eddie before bringing a cupped hand to the side of her head, shaking an upward palm before bringing the fingers in, turning her still extended pointer over. Eddie could only pick out  _ what _ .

“She’s saying you should take the stick up your ass and  _ shove it in- _ ”

Richie shakes her head and slams the toes of her shoes against the floor, kicking her legs like she’s throwing a temper tantrum to drum up enough noise that it drowns out whatever thing her girlfriend was about to say.

“Eddie. Come  _ on _ .” (It was weird saying her own name, especially to her own  _ face _ , but it was the only thing her littler counterpart would listen to. It’d been a whole argument, neither willing to answer to Edith-  _ “Come on you’re the ancient one here, I insist, you deserve to have the grandma name!”  _ -and the only other thing brought to the table was cocky ‘how about Eds?’ from the girl which Eddie had tabled instantly- _ “Yeah, no. Fuck you.” _ -They agreed on both just being Eddie, but neither were happy about it.)

She glares at the girl until she rolls her eyes and looks expectantly at Richie who signs it again. This is apparently a fun game that literally only her Neibolt clone enjoys, mistranslating Richie’s words to insults and curse words and ominous threats, basking in Eddie’s horrified reactions and Richie’s desperate attempts to correct her. She seemed flattered when Eddie had snapped at her about how fucked it was.

“She _ essentially _ said that you should have known what you were getting into.”

“Okay, one? That’s fucking rude. Two: I literally don’t know either of you at all and for the last time I  _ didn’t _ want to bring you.” She slams the doors shut and locks them to the best of her ability. She hears muffled laughter and a particularly muddled, sing-songy  _ and yet here we are  _ from inside.

Richie signs sorry at her through the mirror but Eddie gets the feeling she’s being sarcastic, at least based on her girlfriend’s laughter, she’s extremely hard to read.

Her seat squelches under her as she sits down, the cushion and the back of her pants have been covered in black goop since her annoying little counterpart had decided spewing over it was hilarious revenge for locking them in the van to go to a rest stop.

The second time she’d tried it they’d figured out how to unlock the back manually.

The only thing keeping her slightly sane through all of it is the fact that she gets to drive. Eddie’s always loved driving, she’d been one of the first of her friends to get her license, right behind Mike who’d been driving since fourteen which was fine because with Eddie it meant she could make her teach her. She’d snuck out despite her mother’s protests and passed her test the exact  _ second _ she turned sixteen. It was probably one of her more annoying constant actions as a teenager, how she demanded to drive to all the Loser’s hangouts even after everyone’s sixteenth birthdays came and went (and after Stan begrudgingly took her road test their third week of senior year once their teasing on how long she was putting it off had gotten annoying enough).

Driving had always cleared her head, made her hands shake less, and anxieties shut up until she was parked and the car was off. She hadn’t been able to drive as much in New York City, even though Myran permitted it in favor of  _ walking _ or  _ a taxi  _ or god forbid  _ the subway _ . But driving in New York wasn’t exactly  _ driving _ , it was more sitting in a car, eventually getting to inch up a little, and cursing out strangers from the safety of her closed windows, which was a little therapeutic in it’s own way but absolutely not the same.

This isn’t New York though, it’s simply roads with what feels like a maximum of six other cars on them and she can just  _ drive _ .

And, you know, it’d be perfect if  _ someone _ would stop  _ kicking her seat. _

They’re almost out of Maine when Eddie, running fully on fumes and a good seven seconds from snapping and seeing if it’s easier to kill clown spawn than it was to kill the clown from whence they came, sees the gas light blink on (apparently one of the few lights on this piece of shit car’s dashboard that actually works) and she practically cries in relief, veering into the closest gas station.

“Stay in the fucking van.” She whisper-shouts through the cracked window after pumping the gas, not waiting to hear their response before heading in to pay.

Eddie hasn’t had junk food since college, Myran buys it, but it’s placed in the locked cabinet she can’t reach and doesn’t have a key to. She never really tried to sneak it, she had allergies and Myran knew best what she was supposed to eat. But that was all fucking bullshit and she’s fucking starving so if she inhales a full can of sour cream and onion pringles then maybe she’ll calm down. 

The six canned cold brew coffees she plunks onto the counter next to them probably counteracts any calm she’d be gaining though.

The cashier doesn’t even bat an eye, just rings her up and takes the hundred dollar bill she hands him into the back to check if it’s real. Someone taps her on her shoulder, she doesn’t mean to full body flinch but she does and the person lets out a surprised ‘ _ ooh!’ _

It’s a woman, probably around her age or a little older with graying blonde hair pulled back with one of those big clips Eddie had always thought looked like the ones you use to hold bags of chips closed and kind eyes behind her thick glasses (they’re white cat eyed lenses and nothing like Richie’s, which she literally wore once in the two days Eddie had seen her, but they still make Eddie’s pathetic little heart beat too fast).

“Oh, sorry, dear! Didn’t mean to startle you, I just wanted to say you’re a great mom!” 

“What?” She spots her horrible travel companions before the woman can explain and she has to swallow back the frustrated scream that tries to force its way out. How the fuck is she supposed to explain Eddie; who has opened a bag of gummy worms and promptly spit black-coated candy onto the tile floor with disappointed disgust written over her face. How the fuck is she supposed to explain  _ Richie _ . She forgets momentarily how to breathe, “Oh, look-”

“My daughter always tries to explain all that…  _ cosplay _ stuff to me but I just don’t get it! And here you are doing it with your kids! Super impressive costumes, though I’m sorry to say I don’t recognize where they’re from!” She gestures to Eddie’s bloody, gross clothing and bandaged cheek before nodding at the kids, who, realizing that they’ve been spotted, have half hidden behind the magazine rack (or, to be more specific, Richie has dragged a protesting Eddie to half hide behind the magazine rack).

Her mounting panic attack at having to explain halts, heart still hammering and stomach still in knots, but she can suddenly breathe again, confusion overriding her anxiety.

It can’t be that easy.

It literally cannot be this easy to write off these monster kids as  _ cosplay _ , not that she has any fucking clue what that is. She just nods frantically after gaping dumbfounded at the woman for just a second too long, she looks at her strangely before slapping on a sunny smile.

“I would say though… I’d tell your daughter to put on some shoes, I know it might  _ ruin the look _ ,” She gives her a look over her glasses, like  _ kids, amiright?  _ and Eddie wants to tell her she has no  _ idea _ , “But you never know what germs are all over a gas station floor!” Eddie snorts, stomach turning just slightly at the notion, the little shit would probably  _ lick  _ the floor if she told her how gross it was. 

“Oh… she’s not my-” She catches herself before she can say that they’re not her kids, because she may have lucked the hell out this time but an adult woman in ‘full costume’ with two twelve year olds she isn't related to at a gas station in the middle of nowhere at midnight would absolutely raise some eyebrows she really doesn’t need raised, “ _ Thanks _ .”

Luckily for her the cashier comes back right then and hands her the change, bored and slow, too fucking slow. She needs to get the  _ fuck out _ before she loses it or breaks into delirious laughter or gets so paranoid about someone else seeing the girls and actually asking questions she forgets how to breathe again. He finally hands her the last bill and she shoves it directly in her pocket, not caring how they crumple as she bounds across the store and yanks the two from behind the magazines by their wrists. Richie’s ball joint does a weird shifting pop in and out of it’s socket as she pulls them back to the van and she doesn’t want to break her, unsure of how delicate she needs to be, so she lets go of her the second they're through the door. She trusts  _ her _ not to run but other Eddie is another story and her gross, wriggly wrist doesn’t get freed until she’s back in the car.

Richie circles a closed fist on her chest,  _ sorry _ , but Eddie ignores it, pulling them out of the parking lot and up to the side of the road a couple miles away from the gas station, heart still racing from the almost-close call.

She rests her forehead on the steering wheel, slamming her hands on the dashboard when she sits up. She grabs a can of coffee from the plastic bag in her passenger seat and chugs half of it without stopping to breathe before pulling back onto the road. 

(She’s not looking at them. She doesn’t see, after her hands slam into the dash, loud and angry, the minute way the other Eddie flinches and positions herself in front of Richie, who has grown very,  _ very  _ still).

“Okay.  _ Okay, okay, okay _ . Look, we were lucky, un-fucking-beliveably lucky that the woman back there thought you guys were wearing costumes but you can’t  _ fucking do that _ .”

“Do  _ what? _ Exist?” The voice from the back snaps, immediately defensive.

“You can’t go in  _ public _ , no! People get freaked out when they don’t understand things and then we’re fucked! Literally one suspicious phone call to the wrong person and all of this... _ this _ -” She waves her hand back at them, eyes fixated fully on the empty road in front of her, “Is fucking  _ over _ , got it?”

“No.” She seethes from the back, accompanied by the soft clack of two fingers clicking against the thumb,  _ no _ .

“ _ Christ _ , you idiots can’t do this one fucking thing right? It’s not like you’ve never been outside before!” She groans, speed fluctuating under her foot as she stomps it and rapidly over compensates by fully stepping off the brake.

The van grows silent. Suddenly, uncomfortably silent. 

When she looks up at the mirror into the back black slime is flooding from Eddie’s mouth into a little pool on the floor in between her legs, mouth too occupied to speak as she chokes the sludge out, out but her eyes are aimed at the back of Eddie’s head, glaring like she wants to burn a hole through it. Richie is signing something, looking terribly hopeless despite how angrily her brows furrow and how pointed her hands clink together, Eddie just wishes she knew sign language.

She stops all at once making eye contact with Eddie through the mirror before dropping her head and laying her hand on her girlfriend’s back, keeping the other wrapped in her skirt like she’s trying to stop herself from saying something. 

She looks tired and, just so very slightly, scared. They both do.

Eddie focuses back on the road, trying not to veer too far into the wrong lane, they’re the only ones out but all she needs right now is to come back to life only to die in a car wreck.

She’d wanted peace and quiet before but now that she has it she thinks she might go insane.

“She said that we haven’t.” It takes Eddie a moment to understand her, words so thick with the sludge she hasn’t stopped spewing, it’s slowed though, no longer a river and more of a trickle, “She also called you a bitch.”

Eddie looks back, trying to spot the worried flurry of  _ no _ s that comes when she gets mistranslated but Richie is nodding.

“What do you mean  _ you haven’t? _ ” That seems just slightly more pressing than getting annoyed over name calling.

“We couldn’t leave our house. We were just extensions of Pennywise until like a month ago, he didn’t want us to leave so... we couldn’t.” 

“Wait… what the  _ fuck _ -” That was… a lot. She stops for just a second, right in the middle of the road, she doesn’t trust herself not to do something stupid by accident. 

She’d been calling them kids in her head, but she hadn’t really been thinking of them as actual children, it was hard too when they were oozing and maggot infested and terrifying. But now, turning in her seat to actually see them, they just look painfully young, “I’m sorry-”

“We don’t need your  _ pity _ .” Richie touches her arm and she backs down, swiping pathetically at her chin and shuffling to the corner of the van, scooping the other girl up and forcefully plopping her in her lap.

“We  _ can _ do things right.” 

“What?”

“You said we couldn’t even do _that_ right. _We can do things_ _right_.” Her voice shakes unconvincingly, like she’s trying to convince herself more than Eddie. Richie snuggles closer against her chest.

“Oh.”

The drive is quiet after that. Around two in the morning Eddie pulls into a 24 hour pharmacy, it only takes her a few minutes to find what she needs, she’s something of an expert, and the kids don’t follow her in. When she gets back to the car the back doors are open and they’re both sitting with their legs swinging over the edge. Richie’s legs are just long enough that the toes of her mary janes scrape the concrete. Their arms are pressed together, both staring up at the sky in poorly suppressed awe. There aren't even stars, it’s cloudy and the light from the pharmacy drowns the visible ones out, but, Eddie supposes, it’s impressive if you’ve never  _ really _ seen the sky before.

“Hey, if you guys follow me in anywhere,  _ not  _ that I'm encouraging it, Richie has to wear one of these.” She tosses the bag to them and the doll tugs out the little box of masks, tilting her head as she looks up at Eddie, eyebrows furrowed, “They’re, uh, they’re masks, won’t hide everything but it’s a start.”

She opens it for her and guides her on how to slide the little loops over her ears, they’re nothing special, just light blue, disposable surgical masks but they hide her stitched up lips and wriggling cheek holes, they can deal with the rest later.

She tells herself she’s working out ways the kids can go outside at rest stops more just as a precautionary measure, because she  _ does  _ have a feeling they’re not going to just all of a sudden start listening to her and staying in the car. 

(It’s not the only reason she’s doing it, not at all after what they just told her, she doesn’t have enough in her to focus on the implications of Pennywise being able to control what they do or kid Eddie’s wobbly ‘we can do things right’, but if Eddie can relate to anything it’s someone stronger than you forcing you to stay where you don’t want to.) 

She climbs in next to them, pulls the door closed and tells them not to be stupid before passing out in the back corner of the vam for a few far too short but much needed hours of sleep.

When she wakes up, grimy sunlight filtering from the windshield, the other Eddie is kneeling over her, a slime glob dangling just inches from her face. She slurps it up like the nastiest spaghetti noodle ever when Eddie yelps and shoves her off, both laughing at her as she pats over herself to see if she’d actually dripped any of the disgusting black ooze on her while she was asleep.

Things are back to the bizarre new normal they’ve managed to form in their extremely short time knowing each other, and despite her groaned annoyance, Eddie can’t help but feel just the tiniest bit relieved. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Eddie says BE GAY DO CRIME!  
> Next time we get some more bonding and perhaps! a trip to Goodwill. I'd also like to shoutout @haaaawaiianshirt again as well as @earthvvormed on Tumblr whose art literally fueled me to write this whole chapter
> 
> ((On another, more serious note: After you read this, please find the time to sign petitions, donate, and educate yourself on the Black Lives Matter movement!  
> If you're like me and don't have the funds to donate I recommend streaming videos that donate their ad revenue to associations that can help like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCgLa25fDHM  
> I know this fic has nothing to do with the movement, but it feels wrong not to acknowlege what is happening, it's important and needs to be spread through as many platforms as possible!  
> I'm here for you, I hear you, I support you.))


	3. Eddie Has a Change of Heart

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eddie gets halfway across the country before her van breaks down, it's incredibly eventful.  
> (tw!! attempted nondescript assult for a hot sec)

Eddie is pretty sure a Goodwill in Connecticut at eight in the morning is going to be void of any other human (and vaguely in the realm of human) activity so she feels relatively safe in bringing the kids in. 

Well… no, she doesn’t, because she doesn’t feel safe bringing the kids  _ anywhere _ but Richie has a mask on and she has the ‘costume’ excuse in her back pocket so she thinks, falsely, she can get through it without panicking. 

This trip is a necessary evil, anyway, especially if she ever wants to be able to go to a rest stop without having a fucking heart attack. (Not that the kids had really been following her in anymore. They wandered around the van sometimes and Richie had apparently taken to scrambling onto the top of the van and perching there like a bird, but they didn’t really enter the buildings, not since she yelled.)

If this was New York she’d be pretty confident no one would look twice at a too pale, weird-jointed girl in a mask, a woman who looks like an extra from a horror movie, and a kid who seems to have puked raw sewage. But, unfortunately for her, this wasn’t New York City, it was suburban Connecticut and she had a feeling the people here would lean closer to the Maine-style of human interaction, which was immediate suspicion.

Driving through New York probably would have solved  _ a lot _ of the problems she was currently stressed about, not just the lack of a shit most New Yorkers gave, but her sanity was hanging on by a thread and she can’t let go of the paranoid worry that the second she crosses the New York border Myran will swoop in out of nowhere and drag her back home. 

It’s safer to avoid the state altogether even if driving from Maine to California without crossing New York was taking far more time, gas, and money than she had to spare. Well her no New York plan and the fact that she got lost halfway through Massachusetts (it was entirely her counterpart’s fault and Eddie stood staunch on that point) and ended up in Rhode Island for a good three hours. 

She had driven off without paying for gas like seven times already, it made her feel guilty but she needed to eat and she only had a couple hundred dollars that she couldn’t waste. 

And yet here she was, outside a thrift store and already wincing about the money she’s about to spend; but she’d like it if she could stop getting weird looks when she walks into stores and she had been planning on getting the kids real clothes since their argument a couple days ago. (She still felt a little bad about it even if the other Eddie was truly gifted in making most of her guilt go away by being the most obnoxious kid on the planet.)

Eddie hasn’t been in a Goodwill since she was in her early twenties and it’s honestly overwhelming, apparently not just to her, when she looks over Richie is gripping the other Eddie’s upper arm, eyes wide above the blue mask she’d reluctantly slid on before climbing out of the van. (Kid Eddie had mockingly translated in an over the top, whiny voice that they  _ hurt her ears _ to which Eddie had responded to by asking whether or not her ears could even hurt because they were glass. That was apparently rude.) Other Eddie is staring out into the racks of clothing, grinning dangerously. 

She doesn’t blame either of them for looking sort of dumbfounded at the shelves full of knick knacks and piles of marked down purses, it must be a lot for someone who’d never been in a real store before, hell, it’s a lot for  _ her _ and she hadn’t been isolated in a crack house for twenty seven years.

That doesn’t mean she likes the look spreading across her childhood face. 

“No.” She grabs the collar of Eddie’s t-shirt like she’s an unruly kitten (she sort of is, if she thinks about it, she is pretty sure she actually heard her hiss once when Richie had slapped her upside the head), not letting go when she tries to squirm away.

“What? I didn’t  _ do  _ anything.”

“You were  _ thinking about it _ .”

“Suck my dick.” Richie clacks her hands together to get them to shut up but her shoulders are shaking like she’s laughing at them, she probably is, according to her girlfriend she does it a lot when they squabble like this.

Eddie, only slightly shamefaced from being scolded in public by a twelve year old doll, drags them both to the dressing rooms, ordering them to stay put while she finds them something to wear. Richie sits stiffly on the little bench in the corner, hands clasped politely in her lap and heels of her shoes swinging softly against the metal legs of the seat, she offers Eddie a nod before she closes the curtain. It’s lovely and polite and does nothing to prepare Eddie for how she needs to all but tackle her counterpart after she tries to crawl under her fabric door. She wonders if this is what it feels like to go shopping with a fucking  _ toddler _ . 

The cashier is nice enough not to look at her or throw her out when she finally leaves the two in their little cubicles and goes immediately to a crate full of decorative throw pillows, not caring how gross they must be before shoving her face in one, screaming, and dropping it back onto its pile.

This is going to be the longest shopping trip Eddie has ever been on, and she had to deal with prom dress shopping with her mother (and then later that night prom dress shopping with  _ Beverly Marsh _ and  _ Stan Uris _ to get her an actually acceptable looking dress to change into once they got to the school gym).

**-**

“I’m not wearing this.” Kid Eddie thrusts the sweater back at her, glaring when she doesn’t immediately add it to the growing pile of rejected clothing in her arms.

“Why the hell not?”

“I don’t even  _ want  _ new clothes, I like mine and I’m not wearing you’re  _ stupid, squeaky clean, bullshit _ !”

“Okay first off we’re in a  _ Goodwill _ nothing here is squeaky clean, second-”

The other Eddie scoffs and opens her mouth, letting her tongue loll out right over the knit material just long enough for Eddie to realize, horrified, what she was about to do, before letting black slime spill onto the sweater. Eddie lets it splat against the floor instead of taking it.

“ _ Fuck you _ .” 

She just offers her a crooked black grin before leaning back against the changing room stall and presenting her hands as if to say  _ ‘go ahead, try again’ _ , “I’m doing this as a fucking  _ favor _ dipshit. God, why can’t you be like your girlfriend, she wasn’t a little asshole about it.” She spins back around, grumbling angrily to the rack of discards as she carefully hangs up her armful of plain, normal-kid clothes. 

Richie had actually been stunningly easy to dress, it’d taken her more time to change into the clothes than it took for Eddie to pick them out. She hadn’t argued, just stared at the clothing in Eddie’s arms until she dumped them into her dressing room and put them on.

“Yeah and  _ she’s _ obviously unhappy about it.” The other glowered and Eddie looked back at her, ready to ask her what the hell she was talking about. She followed her forcefully jabbed finger halfway across the store where Richie was staring at a shelf lined with poorly kept porcelain dolls. She poked at one of their little patent leather shoes before looking back down at her own which peeked from under the jeans she’d had to cuff several times until they fit around her inhumanly spindly legs, Eddie would have called it cute if she didn’t know any better.

She was  _ not  _ obviously unhappy, at least not at a first glance. Eddie pretends that it’s because she has half of her face covered, but the girl next to her was more than happy to expand upon her point to prove her wrong. 

She was beginning to be able to read her bits and pieces of her mannerisms as they were pointed out, how her shoulders were folded in awkwardly, just visible under the long sleeved shirt, the way her fingers twisted anxiously around the hawaiian button up that had been layered over it, her constant shifting from foot to foot, how despite all of this movement her mannerisms are lined with a nervous rigidity. 

(It sinks in a little more for Eddie how well these two know each other, the horrifying reality of only seeing one person for twenty seven years.)

The other Eddie rages about how everything was far too big, fixating on the hawaiian shirt slipping off her shoulder and belt cinched as tightly as possible around her waist. Eddie attempts to defend herself, trying to explain that nothing would really fit her properly considering her doll-like anatomy but it was hard to say much when she was being chastised by her own childhood mouth and staring straight at Richie, who really did look supremely uncomfortable. 

“She’s not  _ your _ Richie. She doesn’t like looking like a fucking idiot.” Kid Eddie snapped with finality, poking Eddie hard in the spine like she was trying to hammer in her point.

“Well then she should have fucking said something.” Eddie chokes defensively and her counterpart laughs, sharp and bitter.

“Can’t really say  _ anything  _ can she?” She spins on her bare heel, slamming the dressing room curtain shut and squawking when Eddie yanks it open. She didn’t know when this became a fight but evidently it had, based on the anger she finds herself choking back and the black bubbling furiously from the other Eddie’s lips like a kettle about to boil over.

“Hey, you know what I meant, don’t be a dick about it.”

“Why not? Upset I’m not being a  _ good little girl _ like Richie is?”

“Okay what the  _ fuck  _ does  _ that  _ mean?” She hisses, shushing the other uselessly when she glances back at the sole cashier; a middle aged woman who is now leaning as far as she can across the counter to listen to them, making faces at her phone like this is the most exciting thing that has ever happened to her at work. 

(It is.)

Eddie shuts the curtain, closing them in, and the kid in front of her looks unnervingly panicked at it, scrambling away from her until she bumps into the wall and has nowhere to go.

She takes a step back, hands held up, and her shoulders relax a little. 

“Why the hell wouldn’t she tell you to say something if she was so uncomfortable?” She shrugs.

“She… probably didn’t want you to get mad at her. ‘ _ Good little girls  _ just do what they're told or else they get punished.’” She recites the last part like she’s reading it off a memorized list and it makes something, as disgusted and concerning as it is, click in Eddie’s brain.

“But… she always left the car when I told her not to-”

“Yeah because I  _ made _ her. And that was before you yelled, I think she’s scared of you now.” Eddie’s stomach drops. Part of her wants to laugh, because it  _ is  _ funny, the idea of the manifestation of her best friend’s childhood fears being afraid of  _ her _ , a 5’2 risk analyst from Maine who got her first days of the week pill container for her eleventh birthday; but she’s a  _ kid _ and now she’s scared of her because she yelled and  _ that _ isn’t fucking funny. It’s not funny at all.

“Oh.” The other Eddie rolls her eyes, mouthing  _ oh  _ condescendingly back in her face. She swallows the argument her whole body is itching to make the way one might swallow a particularly unpleasant capful of cherry cough syrup that they unfortunately know will be worth it in the long run, before stepping out of the dressing room, “Look, I need to get stuff for myself. Make sure she gets pants.”

“What?” 

“Go pick out your own clothes, make sure she gets pants and shit so she can’t see her joints… both of you should get pants, actually.” She has a feeling this isn’t going to go well but Eddie offers her the closest thing to a genuine smile that she thinks she’s gotten from her since they met and she finds she doesn’t care all that much. 

She stays leaning against the fitting room as she watches her bound across the store, talking too loud to Richie who signs something she doesn’t understand, a pointer pushing out from under her chin. She flops her head against the girl's shoulder, relieved in a way that makes Eddie feel genuinely guilty, wrapping her in a hug that her girlfriend doesn’t reciprocate, bringing a hand up to flick the back of her head and get her off.

She finds it hard to focus on finding clothes for herself, mind racing and stomach flipping uncomfortably inside out and then right side in everytime she glances back at kids. 

Eddie had shoved a poofy prom dress over the other girl's head and was cackling as she tried to disentangle herself from where it twisted on her shoulders, neither seemed all that focused on finding normal clothing but she hadn’t really expected them to.  _ God _ , sometimes they were so painfully similar to her and Richie as kids that, despite their obvious differences, it hurt, but that wasn’t what was bothering her right now.

_ Good little girl.  _ That's what her counterpart kept saying about Richie, her bitter tone souring any chance that the phrase could be misconstrued as a compliment. 

While her proclivity for getting absolutely livid at the drop of a hat was annoying it was occasionally helpful. She, evidently if the night of their argument and the past ten minutes said anything, had a tendency to drop information through her anger. It was like she was attempting to justify her fury or guilt trip Eddie into feeling bad, which… works but in a different way than she probably means it to. Piece by piece Eddie is managing to slot together the horribly puzzling story of Neibolt Richie and Eddie through her counterparts dropped hints, and despite herself Eddie finds herself not only getting concerned but getting attached, at first she assumed it was just because they were traumatized kids who looked like her and her friend, she’s beginning to think it’s just the tiniest bit more than that.

But she’d never been all that sure why Richie’s counterpart was… like that. Why she was a doll and, as Eddie had put it, a  _ good little girl _ . 

It sort of made sense now, with the slightest bit of context, Eddie felt stupid for not realizing it earlier. 

Richie had always been a lot when they were kids (she’s sure that hasn’t changed, but she really can't speak for how she is now, she’d really only known Adult Richie for a little over a day), she had been loud and rowdy and too much for most people to handle. 

Nice enough adults would have called her rough and tumble or wrinkle their noses before brightly sneering  _ she’s just a tomboy,  _ less than nice adults liked to tell her she was a poor excuse for a girl who needed to be taught a lesson and was probably the antichrist (Eddie was almost certain that the last one was a Sonia Kaspbrak exclusive). 

Even her parents, and they were  _ good _ parents, the kind of people who didn’t belong in a place like Derry because they knew how to care about people, liked to joke that  _ they wish they had a real girl _ when she’d tumble in with her friends, mud splattered and exploding with rude jokes smattered with uncensored curse words. It was a joke, all of them would laugh at it and Richie would smear muddy fingers across her father’s cheek in retaliation before they clambered up to her room. 

(Eddie remembers, blurrily like she hadn’t recognized what she was noticing as a child until right now, the way Richie’s laugh always sounded forced after they’d say it.)

Pennywise had made his version of Eddie to be the opposite of her, everything she feared would happen if she embraced what she most hated about herself.

His version of Richie was everything other people wanted her to be, a twisted reminder that she was wrong and bad and people hated her for it. 

She was a doll, no free will, always forced to do as she’s told (too timid to disobey even when she was sentient). Her mouth was stitched shut, always seen and not heard because her trashmouth is permanently closed. She was just pretty and perfect from the neat little pink bow in her hair to the pair of shiny black buckle shoes real Richie had shoved in the back of her closet, shoe box still unopened from when she claimed she had ‘lost them’.

(But she was rotting, she was abandoned, she was everything people wanted her to be and they still left her alone to break and rot and fill with maggots, because no one cared.  _ She _ was the problem).

All of it is bullshit but it makes sense, it makes a nauseating amount of sense. 

She pushes down her thoughts about Richie, she doesn’t have time for them right now, and unclenches her hands from where they’ve tangled around a blouse she’d just been staring at like it holds all the secrets of this fucked up universe.

It’s an ugly blouse, the kind of shirt that sort of looks like it’s trying to be a flannel but it’s made of the thinnest material you’ve ever felt in your life and the flimsy pearl buttons only go midway down the chest before the rest of it is just a solid material. It’s the kind of thing she has definitely worn before because Myran bought most of her clothing at this point in her life and he liked her to be modest and ugly, apparently.

She drops it back into the row of shirts so fast that the hanger makes an unpleasant screech against the metal pole they’re hanging on.    
God, her life really was shit wasn’t it?

Picking out clothing after the sobering reminder that she had lived the past twenty years as a twisted male version of her mother’s little Edie-bear is difficult. She hasn’t been a  _ real person _ who made her own choices in decades and it was… horrible.

She sort of feels like she should take this opportunity, one big empowering fuck you to Myran where she buys like an feminist-slutty tube top and embraces her new independence. 

But she’s forty and would not look like a woke chick flick movie protagonist, she’d look like an out of touch mom who was still clinging embarrassingly onto her youth, which makes that plan sort of difficult. 

It was also difficult due to the fact that she couldn’t really find it within herself to give a shit. 

She’s perfectly happy with jeans and a plain shirt that is being sold for literally seventy cents, it’s cheap and comfortably boring and she’s fine with that. 

She puts Richie’s jacket back on over her new stuff, keeping the tags for the cashier to scan in the pocket. It’s probably counterintuitive, layering blood stained leather over the outfit that is supposed to make her look closer to normal and further from glorified zombie, but she really doesn’t fucking care. 

The jacket is sort of like the weighted blanket she’d had before Myran had thrown it away because: ‘A ten pound blanket could  _ dislodge _ your natural  _ bone placement,  _ Edith!’, something to wrap around herself and know it will keep her warm and grounded and  _ safe. _ It genuinely might be the only thing keeping her sane, which is concerning, but really, what isn’t concerning about Eddie’s current situation. 

She tells herself the bloodstains aren’t that noticable against the dark brown of the material, and when that doesn’t work because they are, they so fucking are, that it just looks like a pattern, like it isn’t the residual staining left from Richie pressing it against the gaping hole in Eddie’s stomach but something intentional.

Like tie dye… bloody tie dye. 

That makes her laugh, not a  _ real  _ laugh, it isn’t funny enough to deserve that, but a bemused sort of puff through her nose. Stan would have thought that was funny, maybe not the fact that it was  _ Eddie’s blood _ but she’d always had a bizarre sense of humor none of them except maybe Richie could understand. 

Thinking about Stan makes Eddie’s eyes burn dangerously at the corners, so she doesn’t. She doesn’t think about any of the Losers other than Richie and even then she is just a barely tangible end goal. If she thinks about them too hard she knows she’ll start to spiral with all her unknowns, the fact that she doesn’t know what happened after the killed Pennywise, if they got hurt,  _ if she is the only one who didn’t make it _ . That is really what fucks her up, that she doesn’t know if there is anything she is driving to, the other Losers could be fucking dead and Eddie was just picked at random to come back to life. Richie could be  _ dead. _

She buries her hands into the jacket pockets, crumpling the clothing tags with shaky fingers and comforting herself with the knowledge that  _ Richie Tozier’s sudden, mysterious death! _ wasn’t one of the headlines she’d scrolled across while trying to find directions to her house. She doesn’t know much about being semi-famous but she has a feeling that would be plastered across gossip sites the exact second her death was made public, and the fact that it isn’t is weakly reassuring.

She stops thinking about the Losers, she can’t do that to herself right now, not with thousands of miles left to drive and a level of mental stability that could be equated to the stability of a styrofoam coffee cup. 

The kids are a good distraction, a loud, unwanted, gross distraction, but a distraction nonetheless. Other Eddie has resettled into her previous placement, leaning against the dressing room stall. Her hands are shoved in the front of a black hoodie, some grocery store logo stitched in the upper corner Eddie doesn’t recognize. She’s wearing bright red running shorts, probably exclusively to annoy Eddie and her ‘both of you get pants’ proclamation, but all they truly do is entertain her. It’s dull amusement, more of an ironic little twinge in the back of her mind because  _ Christ  _ it’s like she’s  _ trying  _ to look more like Eddie at age twelve with her secret stash of comfortable clothes she can get dirty (‘rowdy play clothes’ that Maggie Tozier had insisted every kid needed when she agreed to drive them to the Bangor mall so the Losers could pool their pocket money and get Eddie things she could functionally move in) that she hid in Richie’s sock drawer like they were something illegal, they’d used to call them contraband. Her red running shorts had always been her favorite.

Despite her eyes and the black stain down her chin (a pack of half dried wet wipes left in the van glove box had managed to wipe it away, so it wasn’t permanent, she just seemed insistent on replacing the smear the second Eddie finally got it to disappear), she nearly looked normal.

“Pretty fucking princess in there has been trying on outfits for the past twenty minutes.” She jams her thumb at the curtain, rolling her eyes so far back into her head that they just look like a pure ball of sickly white-yellow and thumping her skull against the wall. 

Richie stomps her foot loudly from inside the dressing room, conveying her offense as well as she can with a thick soled  _ thunk _ , she scoffs.

“ _ It shouldn’t take this long to cover your fucking knee joints. dipshit _ !” The curtain slams open with a frustrated rattle and Richie flips Eddie off from the doorway, glaring at her in a way that can really only be labeled as pouting, if she had free lips the bottom one would almost certainly be petulantly jutted out. Eddie yanks her into her side and pokes her blackstained tongue against her temple with the same fondness one might press a kiss to the same place, a muted blush spreads where the tops of her cheeks aren’t covered by the mask. It feels far too normal-couple-like and personal, something Eddie shouldn’t be watching. She scans the doll up and down as an excuse to look somewhere else.

Richie looks almost startlingly human and it’s uncomfortable in a way the other Eddie looking human wasn’t. Eddie can spot the inconsistencies, how artificial-shiny her exposed skin is and the way her eyes are completely clouded behind her glasses, but she thinks a stranger might not look twice. She did a good job and it’s unsettling, wolf in sheep's clothing and all that, except this wolf is just a slightly annoying but well meaning sentient doll and her sheep’s clothing is a thrifted too big, too cutesy outfit. 

The other Eddie was right, she looks much less self conscious now, corners of her eyes crinkled happily even as she mopes into her Eddie’s shoulder. 

The sweater she’s wearing, a big, soft, pink thing, flops just slightly over her segmented hands, tucked carefully into a skirt (that is decidedly not the pants Eddie recommended). She has tugged a new pair of knee socks, light pink and ruffly, over her knee joints, one of them slips just a bit at the top where the frayed elastic is worn out, it reveals just a little of the gap between the ball joint and the base of her thigh but it’s better than before and honestly Eddie doesn’t feel like getting murdered by her overprotective girlfriend for pointing it out. It works and that is really all she can ask from this trip, nothing is perfect, nothing can ever feasibly  _ be  _ perfect, especially not right now, but it fucking  _ works _ .

“Okay… okay you know what this is fine.” She concedes, finally looking back up at the girls and grabbing her counterpart’s attention, “You just need shoes and then we are good to go.” 

She stiffens, arms immediately releasing Richie and crossing tightly over her chest. Eddie, recognizing the familiar stance that means they’re about to argue, puffs up just a little, taking advantage of the depressingly slight height advantage.

“ _ Fuck no _ .” 

Richie looks between them quickly, the little ponytail gathered on top of her hair bouncing as she shakes her head back and forth to examine both sides of their standoff. She apparently decides it’s not worth it, holding her hands up as if to say  _ you know what,  _ **_fuck_ ** _ whatever is about to go down here  _ before walking away. Eddie really does not blame her, she almost feels bad for how many arguments she has to sit through, but she also almost always sides with her girlfriend, or at least that is what said girlfriend translates her as saying, and while she is arguably the world’s least reliable source it still significantly decreases her ability to empathize (because she’s just slightly, childishly bitter about it). 

She absolutely made the right choice, anyway, considering it takes a particularly annoying round of bickering in circles that ends with Eddie holding the kid down to force a pair of shoes on her feet. 

Even though it was incredibly embarrassing, she is eventually victorious and the other Eddie is pouting, kicking awkwardly against the shoe rack with the beat up rubber toe of her new sneakers. She didn’t even wait for Eddie to find her a pair of socks before yanking them on which is gross but she’s not willing to even try and fix that. 

She sticks her fingers in her ears when Eddie tries to explain how to tie them just to be an asshole, scrambling for any sort of vindicated win in her loss of their shoe war and promptly trips on her laces on her way to find Richie.

Richie wanders over at her loud ‘ _ fuck’  _ when she topples to the ground and laughs at her, crouching down to tie them for her (her joints are more obvious when she bends her legs, Eddie notes apprehensivly). She kicks lightly at her shins, not nearly as hard as she’d kicked Eddie, whining far too dramatically as they are neatly twisted into little bows. 

It costs more than she should be spending, but she supposes it's worth it, considering Richie literally skips out of the thrift store, which is the kind of cute, girly thing  _ her  _ Richie probably wouldn’t have done genuinely which makes the ache in her core lessen. The trip also made the other Eddie pissy, it’s not that her being uncomfortable makes Eddie  _ happy _ but it’s more than a little satisfying. The brat needs to be taken down a few pegs, even if that feels weird to think considering she’s technically  _ her _ , though, someone probably  _ would  _ have said the same about her as a kid.

“Hey fucker!” Something beans her in the back of her head right before she can climb into the driver’s seat and she whips around, her counterpart leaning against the side of the van. She looks pointedly down at the ground, more specifically at a ugly, decorative christmas brooch lay on the parking lot from where she’d thrown it.

“What the fuck is that?”

“I don’t know, thought you’d like it. It’s ugly too.”

“I literally look like you.” She grumbles crouching over to pick it up; it really is ugly, the snow man on the left side is missing an eye and he still seems to have one too many, “Wait did you  _ steal  _ this?”

She rolls her eyes, like  _ no shit _ and adjusts perhaps the dirtiest, as-close-to-broken-as-possible-without-actually-being-broken pair sunglasses Eddie has ever seen from where they’re sitting in her hair.

“You can’t just steal shit!”

“Why not  _ you _ stole the van!” Eddie shushes her, looking around, probably a little more manically than necessary, even though there is no one else in the vicinity, “Well you  _ did! _ ”

“ _ Yes _ but-”

“I thought you wanted us to blend in?” She slides the sunglasses down over her eyes, the arms catching on her hair as she forces the lenses closer to her nose. It’s admittedly a clever solution Eddie really should have thought of before, not that she’d give her the satisfaction of telling her that. She really has no argument here, and she could  _ try _ but it just feels like she’s setting herself up for failure.

She still stutters uselessly for too long trying to defend herself before banging her head lightly against the drivers side window and climbing in.

She supposes she really hasn’t been the best example against stealing anyway.

When she looks back in the mirror Richie is playing with a little silver locket that the other Eddie had looped over her head, she glances up at the mirror and smirks. 

Eddie gets the feeling she’s being challenged somehow, like the kid is shoving it in her face that she’s the Eddie who is better at romance or some petty bullcrap, but she isn’t sure if she’s just pulling that out of her ass based on her own insecurity. She flips her off anyway.

**-**

Eddie clumsily draws her fingers back to form the letters, focusing too hard on the back of her hand, E  _ fingers half pulled in against palm _ , D  _ pointer up _ , D  _ pointer up,  _ I  _ pinkie up _ , E  _ fingers half pulled in against palm _ . Richie nods, grabbing her hands and forcing her fingers back into the D formation and dragging it to the side.

“What?” She pulls her hands away and finger spells Eddie’s name herself, dragging the double Ds instead of signing them twice. She nods eagerly, finger spelling it again until her fingers orient themselves more naturally into the signs. 

Across the van the other Eddie snorts and she looks away from her hands for a second to tell her to fuck off. The little shit had somehow made the horrible van, which had begun to permeate with the smell of old Mcdonalds and the bizarre melted-plastic fume and vomit scent of the black slime, an even worse learning environment by being incredibly judgemental everytime Eddie hadn’t known something. 

“Just give her a name sign.” Richie huffs through her nose and turns to glare at her.

“A what?”

“ _ A name sign  _ so you don’t need to spell it over and over. She’s literally allowed to give you one.” She explains longsufferingly, like it’s a terrible inconvenience even though it’s all she’s been doing for the past hour, watching and translating. 

Richie rolls her eyes, aggressively pointing at herself and then presenting hooked pointers and thumbs forward like a present. 

“Well if you fucking  _ gave her one _ than teach her  _ that _ instead _ ,  _ dumbass.” Richie arches her loosely cupped hand from under her chin to her girlfriend, that one Eddie recognizes:  _ fuck you _ . She turns back to Eddie and points at herself, crossing her pointer and middle finger into an R before running them across her lips.

“That's the name sign she gave herself, I think it’s boring.” 

_ Fuck you. _

She points at the girl anyway and her bored expression slips into something crookedly excited as Richie pointedly pulls her fingers back into an E and circles them around her stomach, face scrunched in as much disgust as it can be.

“That’s mine! Wanna know what it means? It’s  _ gross _ but with an E for Eddie. Because I’m gross!” She explains enthusiastically, not waiting for Eddie’s confirmation that she actually cared. Eddie supposes it’s an accurate enough title.

“So that’s how I’d say my name?” She draws her awkward E in a circle around her stomach and Richie grabs her hands, shaking her head.

“No, that’d be  _ stupid _ , that’s  _ mine. _ ”

“We have the same fucking name.”

“Oh  _ do we _ ? I must have  _ forgotten _ .” She mocks before Richie slams her hands against the floor to get their attention and points at Eddie before pulling her hand back into an E and scraping it across her palm. Other Eddie cackles, “Oh that’s fucking  _ perfect! _ ”

“What? What is it?” She doesn’t like this, feeling so out of the loop, it’s like she’s watching a foregin film and she is the only one who can’t see the captions or in the middle of a three person conversion but she’s wearing noise cancelling headphones. It’s why she asked Richie to teach her when they pulled over for the night because it was late and raining too hard for her to feel comfortable driving through.

“This,” Other Eddie slides a flat hand over her upturned palm in the same motion Richie had scraped the E, “is clean… or nice honestly it could be either, your nicer than me.” 

She looks to Richie who finger spells something quickly and then slower once it’s clear Eddie is hopelessly lost.

_ C-L-E-A-N. _

She shakes a Y between both Eddies (Eddie thinks it means  _ both _ from previous uses but she really is not sure) before bringing a B to her chin in another sign Eddie has become familiar with:  _ Bitch _ . Both girls snort at that and Eddie lets it roll around her mind for a second before her wobbly knowledge of ASL strings it together enough to realise she said they were both bitches. She lets out a soft chuckle of acknowledgement. Fair enough.

“ _ So... _ I’m Gross Eddie, you’re Clean Eddie.” The other finally finishes, sounding incredibly tickled at the prospect, Eddie herself is rather amused by it, it’s an incredibly accurate description of the two. She brings her hands up and cycles through their name signs, orienting her hands to the shapes.

Richie _r over lips,_ Eddie _E circle stomach_ , Eddie _E_ _scrapes palm_.

Richie looks incredibly pleased as she watches her, leaning against the van wall and tinkering with her stolen necklace (it’s become an annoying familiar sound in the past two days, the gentle  _ clink clink _ of porcelain on heart shaped pewter). From across the van Eddie grumbles that she’s a tryhard. 

They go through simple signs after that, things to make communication with Richie easier and the important ones Eddie should know anyway.  _ Yes, No, Help, Maybe, In, Out, Bitch, Fuck, Asshole,  _ and  _ Turtle. _

“Why turtle?” Both of them look at eachother, heads tilted in the kind of silent, confused conversation they’re uncomfortably good at. (It almost hurts, knocking something deep in Eddie’s chest out of alignment whenever they do it. She used to have something like that with someone and she’d lost it. She might have the chance to have it again.)

“What do you mean?”

“It’s kind of… random, don’t you think?” Richie raises her hands to form turtle, a cupped hand on top of a closed fist like a shell, the thumb of the fist extended and wiggling like a head (it’s the clever kind of sign Eddie thinks her Richie would be entertained by), before putting a pinched hand into a half closed fist,  _ In _ , and then two signs she doesn’t recognize: flat hands opening like a book and pointer up and twisting once.

“She’s saying that turtle was always the first thing in the books, figured it was more important in the real world or something.”

“What books?”

“What fucking other books would they be? The ASL books, dumbass. They just showed up one day.”

“Oh, huh.” For some reason she’d just sort of assumed they’d been spawned with an innate knowledge of sign language, that they’d always had a way to communicate. 

This changes things, it makes something twist in Eddie’s stomach, warm and poignant until she thinks about it too long and suddenly it shifts too warm, it’s uncomfortable, it’s so hot it burns. 

It changes her perspective, to think about Eddie, gross, rude, self centered Eddie, sitting down with a book and studying until she’s fluent, just so she can understand what her girlfriend has to say. 

Eddie put in the time and effort to make Richie heard, comfortable, able to communicate; and,  _ god _ , that’s incredibly touching.

But she needs to wonder how long it was before the books showed up, and how long after that it took for them to get good enough to talk in another language.

How long was it just the two of them trapped in a creaky old house, one voice talking to a blank slate.

How long was Richie stuck in her own head, incapable of saying what she liked, what made her uncomfortable, no way of simply telling her girlfriend what she was fucking  _ thinking _ .

She supposes it made sense, Pennywise didn’t really seem like the type to care how uncomfortable these kids were, he’d probably appreciate it. (But who left the books then?)

However, Eddie doesn’t know how to say any of that, so she just nods and signs  _ turtle. _

**-**

Eddie has been banned from an embarrassing number of establishments in her lifetime, being best friends with Richie Tozier and Beverly Marsh as a kid and then married to a man who likes to yell at innocent waitstaff does that to a person. 

Despite all that, she never really expected to be banned from a rest stop in West Virginia.

To be fair, she probably should have found a way to nip the other Eddie’s stealing habit in the bud when it first presented itself, or at least not made it clear that it was illegal and a ‘bad thing’ which she is sure just encouraged her.

The West Virginia rest stop wasn’t their first test into bringing the kids and their ‘human disguises’ out in the open, but it sure was the biggest. She’d been able to keep a closer eye on them in fast food restaurants and gas station stores than in the massive building with eleven different kiosky stores and a food court. 

Of course they had had their fair share of problems at the other places, other Eddie keeps fucking up when she tries to keep her slime in her mouth, Richie keeps touching things she shouldn’t, and there was one particular incident where a little kid tried to grab Richie’s mask off and Eddie had to stop the other from breaking his wrist with how fast she yanked him away and yelled at him to  _ not fucking touch her.  _ (She’d also taken off her sunglasses just to scare him, he was probably going to be traumatized from being yelled at by a black-frothing, jaundice eyed girl, but what’s childhood without at least a little low grade, supernatural trauma.) And of course there was also the consistent low grade panic attack that bubbled up in her stomach when Eddie would close the back door of the van and unearth her useless pocketful of snacks she can’t even enjoy because the slime had worn off any taste buds that may not have even been there in the first place. 

She claimed she was being resourceful, testing to see if she was able to eat anything that didn’t taste and feel terrible without making Eddie pay for it. Both Richie and Eddie claimed she was being stupid, but Richie kept getting useless gifts from the lame, useless heists so she was significantly less judgemental about it.

But this time hadn’t been like this. No, this time she had tried to steal a thirty dollar West Virginia Themed snow globe, dropped it running away from the security guard who saw her, and then spent the fifteen minutes it took for Eddie to get out of the bathroom and hear her name being paged cursing out the security guard and refusing to take off her sunglasses which just made everything worse.

Like someone-wanted-to-get-law-enforcement-involved worse. 

It literally takes Eddie bursting into frustrated, incredibly pathetic tears to make the security guard so uncomfortable he just awkwardly bans them in an almost apologetic way that makes Eddie feel even worse because how pitiful does a person need to be to have a security guard who was three seconds from calling 911 on your ass say  _ there there  _ as they write down you’re information to ban you. 

She’s sure the fact that before he can escort them off the property they need to find a completely silent child whose face is half covered and then climb into a rusty, nondescript van does nothing but convince him he probably should have taken stronger action and/or called CPS but he lets them go.

The other Eddie goes into extreme detail when recounting the story to an incredibly confused Richie about what happened and she’s halfway through explaining how Eddie was ‘sniveling’ when she snaps.

“Yeah, okay,  _ fuck you. _ This isn’t  _ funny! _ ”

“Oh piss off, it was hilarious!”

“Do you  _ want _ to get us fucking caught then? Is that it? Because this feels like you want to get us caught. Do you know what they’ll do to you and Richie if someone finds out you aren’t human? No. Really, I’m fucking asking becuase all I know is it will fucking  _ suck for you _ and it won’t be my fucking fault. No, that one will all be on you.” That would normally be where she says she should have left them in Derry, and to be honest she sort of just wants to add it for emphasis, but like it or not both parties know it’s more of a lie than it should be at this point.

She doesn’t get a response from the back and she slows enough to turn around for a second, if she’s not mistaken it almost looks like Eddie's hands are shaking before she jams them into her hoodie pocket. Richie slams her hands into the floor to make her look at her before slamming a sideways, flat hand on her open palm with an almost angry sounding clank,  _ Stop. _

She does. She doesn’t really know why she does, but she does.

It’s sort of startling, the way the two have suddenly switched roles, Richie glaring at her in the mirror before leaning protectively against a folded-so-she-is-almost-small Eddie’s side.

“Fuck you.” She mutters after a minute of tense quiet and Eddie flips her off weakly without looking back at them which makes her snort, and she decides to pretend that’s the end of it.

It’s not because she’s still  _ so  _ fucking pissed and their reaction to how angry she got was  _ weird _ but it’s late and Eddie is tired and she needs to find a place to get gas now because the van has been running on fumes for like twenty minutes and she wasn’t able to get any at the rest stop gas station before getting kicked out.

The station she finally rolls up to is the kind of place you probably couldn’t have paid her to enter a month ago, but now she pulls into it with barely present hesitance.

The lights above her flicker as she pumps the gas and the price on the screen keeps jolting too high too fast, by the time she walks into pay she feels like someone is watching her. 

Someone is, theres only her, the cashier, and another man inside and said man is just fucking watching her as she walks in, he’s holding a pack of Marbolos and a bag of sunflower seeds, leaning against the counter. He’s clearly already paid but he doesn’t leave, just watches her. She zips her half undone jacket to the collar.

He follows her as she walks over to the shitty coffee machine (she had planned to go to the Starbucks in the rest stop before the subsequent almost-arrest and if she’s being honest she might be more angry about having to drink bad gas station coffee than actually getting kicked out). 

It barely takes a glance back for her to realize he’s checking her out, which would be laughable considering how gross, exhausted, and gay she is, if it didn’t make her so incredibly uncomfortable. She’s in a really bad mood right now and she’s not up for this, not that she ever would be but normally she’d just ignore it and hope for the best. She’s already simmering and he’s standing  _ so fucking close  _ that she can smell how much he reeks of smoke (not in the way Bev does, it’s not exactly a  _ good  _ smell on Bev because it’s just objectively nasty, but Bev makes it feel sort of… elegant in a going to die of cancer in the most dramatically gatsbian way possible across a chaise lounge. This dude just smells sour and gives off waves of throat-clogging smog).

“Black coffee, huh?” He says like it’s an incredibly amusing inside joke, her stomach clenches uncomfortably.

“Can I fucking help you?” She doesn’t look at him, slamming the lid on her cardboard to go cup and trying not to lose it because talking to him is already  _ such _ a bad idea. Not talking to him is literally What Not To Do When A Creepy Man You Don’t Know Is Checking You Out 101.

“No, just wondering what a little lady such as yourself is doing alone out here.” She wants to tell him how fucking stupid he sounds saying  _ little lady _ to a forty year old woman who isn’t fucking interested, like he’s some ugly, one off  _ Little House on the Prairie  _ hero. 

Instead she nods hard and walks to the counter, he speed walks in front of her with his stupid, long legs so he gets there first. Fucking asshole.

He pays for her gas and her coffee, she tries to communicate telepathically with the cashier not to let him but somehow it doesn’t work. Her heart pounds too hard in her chest as she leaves, coffee burning against her hand because in her haste to get out of there she didn’t think to grab a cardboard sleeve.

“Aren’t you gonna thank me?” He followed her to her car.  _ He followed her to her car. _

Being a girl in Derry had always prepared her for this sort of situation, and New York City was the kind of place that made you keep pepper spray on your key ring and your hair out of ponytails so it wouldn’t be easy to grab. 

But this was uncharted territory, and very, very rarely had she had to deal with this sort of thing completely alone.

“Thanks.” She grinds it out like it physically hurts her, it does.

“Oh, I was hoping for something a little better than  _ that. _ ”

“Can you  _ fuck off? _ ”

He grabs her wrist before she can shove him off and slams her back against the side of the van, she’s been wobbly and weak since coming back to life and he’s way stronger than her, not that she was all that strong to begin with. 

_ Shit. Shit. Shit. _

_ He’s pressed against her and he smells so fucking bad get the fuck away right fucking now she can’t breathe let go let go let go- _

“What the  _ fuck? _ ” He loosens his hold on her for just a second but it's enough for her to yank away, he stumbles a bit into the van before a thick soled mary jane shoe slams against his forehead. Richie looks terribly concerned when she glances up at her, perched carefully in her favorite spot on top of the van, faded dents patterned against the side where her legs had swung against it like they swung into the asshole’s head. She’d never been more grateful for the kid, who’d yanked down her mask so her creepy little face is on full display as she glares at him. 

He lunges for Eddie, looking more like he’s trying to just continue what he was doing before as a way to avoid making sense of Richie than anything else, she dodges for the passenger side door and someone yanks him back before he can do much of anything. 

The other Eddie is bubbling angry sluices of sludge down her front, glaring with yellow eyes so livid they look like they’re glowing.

“What the fuck do you think your doing?” It’s slurred and hard to understand but shit if it isn’t terrifying. He scrambles back, and there is something vindicating in watching this pervert shit his pants over a little girl. 

His back rattles against the dispenser, “What  _ are you?” _

“We’re your worst nightmare.” It’s an incredibly cheesy line but she looks proud of herself, Richie bangs her fist against the roof in enthusiastic solidarity, and despite it being the tagline of every horror movie since 1982 it seems to do the trick for the man, who’s head cracks concerningly loud against the gas pump when he collapses, yelping nonsense that may be some poorly remembered attempt at a hail mary as his eyes roll back in his head.

Eddie really does not care enough to check if he’s alive but she presses her fingers to his neck on principle, Richie sliding down expertly and climbing in the back as she finds the dull thud of his pulse below the uncomfortably sweaty skin.

When she stands up Eddie is still standing where she was when he collapsed, dripping and clearly trying to pull back in the mania that's rolling off her in waves.

“What the fuck was that?” She really does not want to explain the intricacies of assault to a monster kid who is out in public for the first time in 27 years but she’s looking between the two of them, eyes so helplessly confused and guarded that she feels like she needs to say something.

“He,” She kicks him none too lightly in the side for good measure, “is a piece of shit.”

“Yeah I fucking  _ figured. _ ” But her shoulders untense just a little, she wipes her wrist across her mouth.

“Thanks for that… both of you.” She calls a little louder and Richie pokes her head out of the back of the van so quickly it’s clear that she’d been listening right next to the door. She lifts her hands and signs something Eddie actually understands.

_ You O-K? _

“I’m fine,” Her hands are shaking, “Lets go.” 

She offers them both a smile which Richie returns, corners of her lips turned up just a little, and Eddie shoves her with a slime-sticky hand, it feels fond in a way their interactions normally don’t. 

She figures it’s enough of an apology for the rest stop.

When they drive off Eddie translates what Richie is signing so she can actually be part of their conversation instead of the one sided nothing she normally gets.

They spend the next hour before Eddie feels calm enough to pull over shit talking the man, speculating about how long he was going to lay there and whether or not it was in a puddle of his own piss, and even though none of them are willing to admit it, it’s nice.

**-**

Apparently growing camaraderie, specifically the kind formed by possibly scaring a gas station pervert close to death, prevents serious arguments but it doesn’t prevent bad things from happening.

Go figure.

They’ve been driving through what seems like Corn Land, Land of Corn and literally nothing fucking else for the past two days and Eddie is going to lose her mind sooner rather than later if she sees another fucking ear of the stuff. So, of course, that is when the van decides to break down.

It was inevitable, the car was a hunk of junk when she stole it and she’d been driving it nonstop halfway across the country, but she would have preferred it if it hadn’t happened on a dirt road in the middle of fucking no where.

She slams on the hood, she’d known a decent amount on repairing cars as a teenager, weeks spent helping Mike fix up her truck and tuning up the shitty dodge her mom didn’t approve of her driving, but that was decades and one clown-memory wipe ago. 

“I’m gonna walk and see if there's anything near here. Stay close by, if I find someone to jumpstart us I’m leaving whether you're in the car or not.” They all know she’s lying though.

Something fundamental had shifted at that gas station, a lot of their quips held a lot less heat.

She walks for an hour before deciding to turn back, there isn’t anything, just fucking  _ corn _ and open fields. She thinks you’d probably be able to see the stars great from here, that the kids would probably like going out into the grass and looking at them. She wonders when she started looking at the world through the lense of what the shitheads practically hitchhiking in the back of her van would like.

It’s hot, hotter than it has any right to be for late fall or early winter, not that she has really bothered finding out what the exact date is. By the time she turns around, sweat has loosened the bandage on her cheek, she’s had to tie Richie’s jacket around her waist, and she’s incredibly grumpy. No forty year old woman should be able to be classified as grumpy but she’s somewhat of a master at it.

What all that really means is she is absolutely not amused when she comes back to where the van is in sight and can already hear the other Eddie yelling.

“ _ God you’re so fucking annoying, you’ve always wanted to and now that you can you aren’t gonna? _ ” She does not want to have to deal with this. Not at all.

“What the hell are you arguing about?” She shouts, rapping her hand on the side of the van before she gets to the back and climbs in. They’re sitting as far apart as they possibly can, Eddie’s cheeks ashy red and fists clenched tightly against the carpet and Richie curled in a tight little ball, one hand raised in a closed  _ no _ , the other tangled tightly around the chain of her necklace.

“She’s being fucking  _ difficult. _ ” Eddie snorts, climbing in and seating herself near the doors, trying her best not to get physically in between the two.

“Based on past experience I have a feeling you're the one being difficult.

Richie’s shoulders jolt like she’s laughing as she pointedly lifts a flat hand to her chin before bringing it out.

_ Thank you. _

“Okay, fuck you, you don’t even fucking know whats going on!” Eddie turns to look at her, rolling her hand as if to say  _ elaborate, please _ , “She won’t cut her stitches!”

“Wait… can she even do that?” Eddie asks, genuinely curious but Richie scoots away from her angrily, like she’s insulted, lifting her hand in front of her face and signing  _ no _ .

“ _ Yes!  _ She fucking  _ can _ but she keeps being annoying about it!” Eddie fumes and she jolts up so she’s sitting higher on her knees and sticking her arm out fully in front of her girlfriend.  _ No. _

“Nothing bad is going to happen... if you do want to cut them.” Eddie adds softly trying to diffuse the tension that has permeated in the small space. The glare Richie shoots in her direction reminds her that she really shouldn’t get herself involved in arguments between the two, especially when she didn’t understand exactly what they were talking about.

_ No. _

“Why  _ not _ !” The other Eddie whines, sounding a little like a child who has been told they can’t get what they want from the grocery store candy aisle.

_ N-O.  _ She spells it out, stiff and inarguable, even though her girlfriend keeps trying, black starting to gather at the corner of her lips.

“You need to cut them!”

_ N-O. _

_ N-O. _

_ N-O.  _

Her signing gets choppier as she gets more desperate, eyes squeezed shut. She keeps spelling out  _ no no no N-O N-O N-O _ . 

“Hey, maybe you should leave it alone-” Eddie awkwardly lays her hand on the other girl’s shoulder, drawing it back in uselessly when she shoves her off. She’s not good at resolving conflict, whatever cosmic entity decided she should be the adult in this situation had a fucked sense of humor.

“ _ No! _ Maybe she should stop being  _ stubborn and just cut her stitches! _ ”

Richie squeezes her eyes shut so hard the soft sound of porcelain grinding against porcelain is audible, lifting her hand to, presumably sign  _ no _ again when the other Eddie shouts at her to just ‘ _ cut them!’. _

She drops. It’s incredibly startling, an all of a sudden total collapse that makes Eddie’s stomach bottom out; her lifted arm thunks against the floor, quickly followed by the rest of her, toppled over and crumpled on herself like a puppet whose strings had been abruptly cut. Or a doll whose owner had decided was no longer interesting and abandoned her carelessly on the floor. It’s honestly terrifying, how suddenly she looks so inanimate, face stiffly blank and eyes somehow even less clear than they were before, not like they were dead but like they had never been alive in the first place. 

Eddie yelps and looks horrified to her counterpart who doesn’t seem as distraught as Eddie feels, no, she looks  _ livid. _

“Oh, that’s real fucking mature, you goddamn  _ asshole _ !” Eddie doesn’t think she’s been this hopelessly confused ever in her life, which she’s sure is a lie because she’s been subjected to a lot of fucked up confusing things, but it might have something to do with the confusion being swirled with the terror of thinking you watched a child she’d grown slightly fond of just straight up  _ die _ out of nowhere.

_ “What?” _ Her counterpart glances at her like she’s just remembered she’s still there before half standing up and shuffling over to her collapsed girlfriend.

“Oh, she’s fine, just being a  _ dick!” _ She tilts her head up forcefully by her hair, which makes Eddie wince even though she’s pretty sure she can’t feel it, and shouts the last part into her ear. Despite how obviously furious she is, she drags the other girl’s limp body across the van to settle her into her apparently designated place in her lap.

“This is  _ fine? _ ” She gestures helplessly at the two of them, because honestly if her girlfriend who looked like a doll all of a sudden started  _ acting _ like a doll she doesn’t think she would be nearly this calm.

“Yeah, I mean, normally she doesn’t, like,  _ choose _ to do it, but she… she always wakes up.” Something shifts a little in her tone, less casual and a little more shaky.

“Wait… she doesn’t  _ choose to _ but she’s  _ done it before?  _ What the hell does that mean?” This is absolutely not as okay as the other is making it out to be and she thinks if she doesn’t get clarification soon she might just start crying.

“She doesn’t exactly like being a normal doll so it really only happens when she’s overwhelmed, that or-” She looked away from Eddie and swallowed thickly, slow and squelching with slime, burying filthy fingers in Richie’s hair, though it wasn’t entirely clear if she was combing through the curls or just tangling them further, “Or...  _ he’d  _ make her when he wanted to punish us. But she’s not like fucked up from it so she’ll be fine.” 

That is not  _ nearly _ as reassuring as she thinks it is. To be fair none of the times they’ve brought up Pennywise have done anything other than fucking horrify her.

“Okay, you can’t just gloss over that now that you’ve said it, what the fuck do you mean punish you?”

“What the fuck do you  _ think _ it means? Do you think he was fucking  _ nice to us? _ ”

“No! No, _ but _ you were never all that clear on how he did shit to you, I thought he was  _ asleep. _ ” The girl next to her droops a little, a single drop of slime slipping down her chin and smearing across Richie’s cheek. She thinks after a moment of terse silence that she’ll need to drop it, just wait for Richie to wake up and just pretend like her little doppelganger didn’t keep letting absolutely devastating information slip. 

“He was… asleep, I mean. That’s kind of why we were there, he forgot to get rid of us before you guys made him go into hiding and by letting some of the deadlights live inside us and giving up a little of himself he could still like… see what was going on and fuck with people through us. I don’t fucking know why we’re still here after he’s dead though.” That clears some things up, why the kids didn’t disappear after 27 years, what Pennywise was doing with them, but it ultimately just prompts more questions than it answers.

“Oh… so he could literally just control you.”

“Why the fuck do you even care?” She snaps, yanking Richie closer, something protective and anxious lining her whole body.

“Because I fucking care about you guys, dipshit.”

“Oh.” She flops against the wall like the wind had all of a sudden been knocked out of her sails, she looks tired and terribly surprised (which Eddie sort of understands, it surprises her too, how much she suddenly cares about these little demons). 

“Look, I know what you went through was fucked and you want to seem tough or whatever. But you can talk about it, you know?”

“ _ Whatever _ . It’s… just… I don’t like when things like  _ this, _ ” She lifts Richie’s arm and shakes it so the wrist rattles around, “happens _.  _ It makes me feel like this is gonna be the time she doesn’t wake back up.” 

“How do you mean?” She asks carefully, like she’s talking down a startled animal. Maybe she is. Eddie exhales, thick and gurgling, before burying her face in Richie’s hair. Eddie thinks she hears her press a kiss to the crown of her head but she swallows back her gut instinct to tease her for it.

“The last ten years before he woke up he sort of started… to get weaker? I think he was conserving his energy for when he woke up or something, I don’t fucking know. We, um, we tried to escape. I actually got out the door but when I looked around she was just on the floor… she was just  _ gone and he knew I wouldn’t leave without her so he… he just-” _ She clasps a hand over her mouth, trying to slow the flow of the ooze through her lips, turning away from the girl slumped against her chest to let it spill onto the floor. 

Eddie restrains herself from rubbing her back, she doesn’t think she’d appreciate it.

“He just… what?”

“He normally let her wake up after a couple hours, after he thought it taught me my lesson or some shit, but that time he was just so  _ angry  _ and I was alone for  _ so long. _ ” To Eddie’s absolute horror there are black tears slowly making their way along her cheeks, the same slime slipping from her mouth now clinging to her lower lash line and streaking down her face like horrifying, thick mascara.

“How long?” She prompts, gentler than she thinks she’s been to her counterpart before. 

It’s easier to be gentle with Richie, she’s physically breakable and much less obnoxious, not to mention her startling likeness to the child-version of the woman Eddie is in love with, while the child-version of herself is obnoxious and nasty and gross. But she feels like right now calls for a softness she isn’t sure she can attain, resting her hand on the kid’s knee before she jolts it away.

She’s quiet for so long, not even bothering to deflect with a too mean joke like Eddie had been anticipating.

“Two years.”

“ _ What?” _ She thinks for a moment that she misheard, that it was too slurred by gunk and she actually said something that wasn’t  _ two fucking years of complete solitude _ , but the girl’s voice is startlingly clear.

“I didn’t think she was ever going to wake up and it would have been my  _ fucking fault.  _ It was always my fault.  _ I bet thats not fucking suprising. _ ” She feels like she should negate that, there is something sickening in hearing a kid blame themselves for something that was completely out of their control but she’s still so  _ floored _ at the horrifying concept of being absolutely alone for 730 days except for what is essentially her girlfriend’s corpse.

“ _ Two years?”  _ She snaps her head in her direction, wiping the tears off with her sleeve, looking embarrassed but way more intensely serious than she thinks she’s ever seen her.

“You aren’t going to tell her that. She doesn’t know that it was that long and it would just make her feel bad so you aren’t going to  _ fucking  _ tell her!”

“ _ You _ didn’t tell her?”

“ _ Promise you won’t asshole or I’ll fucking kill you! _ ” 

Eddie promises eventually, but it feels like a mistake.

“It wasn’t really your fault, you know that right? Pennywise was a monster, he shouldn’t have hurt you just because you didn’t do what fucked up shit he wanted you to.”

“Her. He hurt  _ her _ whenever  _ I _ messed up. He figured out pretty early that it was worse for us to watch the other one get hurt… and you know what? That’s  _ your  _ fault!” She all but growls, at least she’s not crying anymore.

“Okay, how the hell is that my fault?”

“I don’t care about anyone! But I fucking care her so much… like an  _ asshole _ and it’s all because you’re a piece of  _ shit  _ who was scared of being in love with her best friend! That’s your fucking fault!”

“Well I’m  _ sorry  _ for having internalized homophobia in the eighties!”

“You should be!” Under her vague annoyance Eddie is just glad that things are at least a little bit back to normal, she knew this was probably an important conversation to have but she’d never been good at serious talks.

“Hey… did he ever hurt  _ you _ ?” She asks before they can veer too far away from the actual “serious talk” regardless of how unpleasant it may be, she wasn’t sure if they’d get as vulnerable as they were right now again, maybe ever.

“Sometimes? She tried to cut her stitches once and he, like, made my lungs start to make  _ too much _ of the black shit so I couldn’t breathe and it fucking  _ hurt _ but… that doesn’t matter.” 

“Hey. It matters.” She forces her to look at her and repeats it. She may not be good at this but she isn’t about to make this kid think someone forcing her to choke on her own body fluids didn’t  _ matter. _

“You know that’s probably why she doesn’t want to cut them right? Because the last time she did you got hurt?” It’s almost amusing how quickly her whole face flushes red.

“ _ Whatever. _ Hey...what's your Richie like?” She lets the other girl flop lower across the floor so really only her head was slumped against her legs while the rest of her body was sprawled flat.

“What?”

“ _ Your  _ Richie, the one we’re driving across the goddamn country for, you haven’t talked about her.” It’s obviously a deflection, and a poor one at that, but Eddie decides to allow it, even if talking about Richie makes her heart clench so painfully it’s hard to breathe.

“Oh… well she’s  _ loud _ ,” Both glance at the unconscious girl in between them, the younger snorts, “and she’s funny… really funny when she actually tries but you can’t tell her that or it’ll go to her head. She’s… nice, like actually nice just naturally, she’s the kind of person that if you asked her she probably wouldn’t tell you she’s a good person because she doesn’t even need to try which is incredibly unfair, if you ask me.” She rattles off, it feels weird to talk so personally about a person she doesn’t really still know as intracticly as she once did and is pretending to now, but somehow she knows she isn’t lying, “And she’s beautiful… god, that sounds shallow but she’s so fucking pretty-”

“Ew.” The other interrupts, nose scrunched like she smelled something unpleasant (or maybe something wonderfully pleasant, she still hasn’t managed to figure out how much of an Addams Family situation she’s dealing with here, if everything that's good is bad and bad is good or they just have a little overlap.)

“What, you don’t think your Richie is pretty?”

“No! She’s disgusting! That’s part of the reason I like her, pretty is just  _ boring. _ ” It’s a much more reasonable answer then she was expecting to receive.

“Fair enough… not even a little bit though?” She receives a glare for her teasing but after a moment she reluctantly mutters:

“Well… maybe she's a little  _ cute  _ but she isn’t  _ pretty. _ ”

“Whatever you say.” She sing songs, resting her head against the wall and closing her eyes.

“Shut the fuck up!”

The quiet, stilted conversation is much less awkward than expected, they sit with the doors open, waiting for someone to drive past to jumpstart their van. No one drives past.

By the time the sun has sunk far beyond the Corn Horizon and night falls over them like a dark, cool blanket they have run out of things to talk about. Eddie runs her through normal world basics and she comes up with creative insults to jab at her but that’s really all they’re willing to share, neither too open about sharing personal information after the, admittedly draining, previous conversation. 

“Hey, is she light enough to carry?” She asks after they’ve been sitting in complete silence for a while. 

“Yeah… she’s fucking hollow, dude.” Eddie informs her, eyeing her warily as she tugs the doll back up against her chest.

“She’s  _ hollow? _ ”

“Pretty much, I mean if you break her in certain places I think she can bleed so there’s gotta be  _ something _ in there but-“

“She can  _ bleed?! _ ”

“Calm the fuck down, why?” 

Eddie stands up, dusting off her pants and pulling Richie’s jacket back on before hopping out and gesturing for her to follow.

“Where are we going?”

“Come on, do you trust me?” 

“Fuck no.” It sounds more like she’s lying through her teeth than Eddie is sure she intends it to. She extends her hand to help her out of the van but she resolutely ignores it, studying one of her hands and how it rests on Richie’s tilted shoulder.

“I can carry her if you want but I want to show you something and I figured you would want to bring her in case she wakes up.”

“No way in hell you’re carrying her!” She snaps, glaring half-embarrassed when Eddie laughs at her before awkwardly dragging her girlfriend out of the car. She does so in a way that slams Richie’s porcelain legs against the dirt road hard enough that it makes Eddie entirely confident she didn’t have a plan other than Not Letting Her Help. She flops her over her back in a weirdly functional piggyback position before turning to her, “Just shut the fuck up, let’s go.” 

The walk to the first open field she found seems shorter at night when the sun isn’t beating down and she has someone keeping her company (two someones technically, Richie’s silent unconsciousness almost feels more welcome than the wary way Eddie has been looking her up and down as they walk.)

“Wow. It’s nothing.”

“Well, to be fair, there is dirt.”

“I  _ guess _ that’s good enough for me.” She flicks her in the back of the head, lighter than she thinks she would have yesterday, before ushering them to the center of the field. Other Eddie drops her girlfriend off her back in an unceremonious heap before groaning lightly and resuming their position in the van, Richie’s head resting in the dip where her legs cross. Eddie pretends not to notice how she is clearly checking the girl’s limbs for cracks from when she dropped her, she thought it was on purpose but now she isn’t quite so sure.

“Look up,” She nudges her shoulder as she settles next to the two, rolling her eyes when Eddie stubbornly looks down at the girl in her lap, she reaches over and touches her chin, forcing it to face the sky, “ _ Trust me.” _

She turns her face to Eddie, sticking out her tongue before reluctantly turning her attention upwards.

Any semblance of the annoying, irritability that normally creases her face slips away to something more earnest, wide eyed and awestruck. 

She looks like a kid.

“ _ Oh.” _

“Yeah,  _ oh. _ ” She teases, looking up herself. She was right, the stars are incredible out here, no light pollution, no people, just them and the dirt underneath and constellations Eddie has never seen before.

It’s hard to see the stars in New York City, there’s too much light and nothing ever shuts off. She missed them more than she thought. 

But the other Eddie is seeing them with completely fresh eyes, she’s never seen them like this and Eddie wishes she could experience that again; feeling as though the whole sky was just one big blue-black blanket with millions of pinprick holes pierced through it, and thinking that perhaps it could just tumble around you at any moment, wrapping you up in its warmth and not letting you go, permanently locked in the nebulous comfort of the stars and their glow. Feeling as though you wouldn’t mind at all if you never came back to Earth.

The sky looked like this when she was a kid. Her legs are dangling off the quarry and Richie’s arm, scrawny but strong is wrapped around her shoulder. Ben’s hand is in her’s, loosely locked like it’s the only thing tethering her to the ground and the only light is from the cigarette that she only complains about on principle at this point as it’s passed between Bev and Bill’s long, pale fingers. The sky and the stars and the whole world were last like this when she was a kid, when everything felt right for just one perfect moment.

They don’t talk, it only feels like minutes but it’s probably longer, the sound of other Eddie shifting in the grass finally crinkling through their fragile silence.

“‘Morning, Dollface.” Richie blinks once, as if reorienting herself, before squinting at the girl leering above her, looking perhaps more angry than Eddie thinks she’d ever seen her tense face manage to twist. Other than that she makes no effort to move.

“Hey, you okay?” Her eyes flick over to Eddie, she looks a little surprised but she doesn’t lift her hands to reassure her.

“Oh… she’s  _ fine.  _ But she needs some time to reorient herself to her body so she can’t really move for a while,  _ which means _ I can call her whatever I want to get back at her for leaving me alone because  _ she can’t hit me!  _ Isn’t that right  _ Dollface _ ?” The doll’s eyes narrow, huffing air oh, so angrily out of her nose.

“She can still hit you later.” Eddie points out.

“Yeah but she wouldn’t, it won’t be quite as satisfying.” She receives another huff for her efforts and she leans over, Eddie looks back up before she can watch just how gently the other kisses her forehead.

“Hey, Richie, look at the sky.”

And she does. They all do, long after Richie can roll her creaky, grindy wrists of her own accord, after the two move a little further away, tangled a bit tighter together, after Eddie has laid down, feeling peaceful for the first time since she was resurrected (for the first time long before that).

“Hey Eddie?” She looks over at the two kids, Richie raises her flat hand, still a little stiffly from being dolled out, to her chin before bringing it out.

_ Thank you. _

“No problem.”

She means it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a fucking Chapter holy shit sorry it took a bit but apparently for a person who is pretty conversational in sign language I really suck at describing someone signing huh?  
> Also I said: N!Eddie will have exactly One Pet Name and N!Richie will hate it more than Anything In The World  
> Anyway they're SOFT and GROSS and a FAMILY even if they didn't WANT TO BE  
> One more chapter to go!! Probably!!


	4. Eddie Goes Home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eddie, Eddie, and Richie complete the final stretch of their journey!
> 
> (Tw! I mention Stan's attempt in one sentence in the scene on the beach)

Something fundamental had changed that night, Eddie likes to believe it brought them closer, and in a way it had, there was a sort of understanding running like an undercurrent through all their interactions, a barrier had been broken down. That being said, breaking down barriers leaves you vulnerable and it is clear the other Eddie isn’t exactly prepared for that, like in telling Eddie her secrets, she’d somehow lost some of the basic trust they’d been operating under; a give and a take. 

In the light of day, after all is said and done, things were awkward. Stilted conversation awkward, warning eye contact awkward, both Eddies sizing each other up trying to see if the revelations last night were going to change things and whether or not they really wanted them to awkward. 

Poor Richie, who was really only conscious for the cool down of their emotionally taxing night, seemed incredibly confused at how tense everything was, obviously uncertain over whether she should be intervening over the incredibly threatening glares her Eddie shot at the other whenever she tried to bring Richie into the conversation, like she was just waiting for her to break one of her weakly sworn promises. (Unfortunately for Richie, neither Eddie was really up to offer much of an explanation.)

Luckily, for literally everyone involved, someone came by eventually to jumpstart them, a woman who didn’t ask questions and clearly misinterpreted their situation if the fifty she left folded in a napkin with the number of a mechanic and a hotline scrawled in it is any indication. 

Being able to drive didn’t exactly make things less awkward, but it eased some tension, creating the slight separation through the seats they’d gotten used to. She got less immediate death glares when the other Eddie thought she was bringing up something from last night that she wasn’t supposed to, or, at least if she did she couldn’t see them.

They had basically been driving nonstop since they broke down to make up for lost time, it probably wasn’t healthy but Eddie put exhaustion about the low grade panic attack that took over whenever she thought about the hours lost to sleep, hours she could be getting closer to Richie.

That being said, short coffee breaks are a saving grace. Richie, apparently a little more perceptive to how other people are feeling, stomped her foot and sat down at a little patio table outside a cafe after Eddie had gotten her drink, effectively forcing her to sit down and relax while she finished the coffee.

She can’t quite complain, she does of course, but not all that hard, she needs a break and… well, she likes getting the chance to actually watch the kids.

There is a sort of intricate beauty to observing how they interact after that night, things make more sense in a tragic, previously unconsidered but obvious way. 

They’re both sitting on the curb, Eddie crunching happily on a free cup of ice (which they’d discovered a few stops ago she could eat when she snatched Eddie’s iced coffee and realized the cold fought off the slime enough to actually consume something and she’d been so delighted Eddie had to humor her). Even when they’re not obviously touching, Richie off her normal seat in her Eddie’s lap and their hands otherwise occupied with a plastic cup and a straw Richie had been twisting in between her fingers, they make sure to have conjoined points. It’s like they don’t know how to be apart, or they just desperately do not want to be, not that she blames them. 

It’s clear in how Richie’s ankle crosses loosely behind Eddie’s, or Eddie will put down her drink to readjust the straps of the mask behind Richie’s ear, deftly tangling a lock of her hair around it before dropping the hand, keeping their upper arms pressed close.

She doesn’t think she’s noticed that before, how codependently they direct themselves through the world, she wonders if it was something that had started after the two years that Richie was gone, if she woke up one day and suddenly Eddie was clinging to her desperately, like she was scared she’d float away. Part of her thinks so, but the other part has a feeling this is just what happens when you are the other’s only company for twenty seven years, sometimes they seem like they’ve forgotten their world isn’t just three dusty floors and a basement that housed a sleeping monster. There's a way they still hold themselves, guarded and mutually protective, that's far more telling about the lasting effects of their lives before they were free than their words could ever be.

“What the  _ fuck _ is that?” She looks up (it’d literally only been a second where she’d been distracted stirring her coffee, what on earth could they have gotten into now?) to see a big, round ball of a bulldog straining huffily against it’s leash, trying to drag it’s owner over to the girls. The owner lets his hold on the leash relax a little as he looks between the Eddies, slightly confused at the strange statement and clearly trying to hide it.

Eddie kicks the other harder than she means to in her side, a ‘you’re being weird so keep it down’ warning that always gets her the kind of glares she’s convinced the phrase ‘if looks could kill’ is based off of. Richie grabs her ankle before she can retract it, fingers cold and nimbly fidgeting where the cuff of her pant leg meets skin as she signs  _ what,  _ nodding to the bulldog with a sort of nervous reservedness she isn’t quite sure she’d have picked up on before. 

“It's a  _ dog.  _ You guys know what  _ dogs are, _ because  _ everyone knows what dogs are.” _ The owner shoots her a look, like he’s trying to translate whatever the fuck that could mean, she almost feels bad for him, clearly attempting to piece together their impossible puzzle, with all their wrong shaped pieces, as his dog attempts to dislocate his shoulder.

“This, uh, this is Orbie… you can pet him if you want.” He takes a step forward and the other Eddie shifts Richie just slightly behind her with such quick, practiced ease that Eddie doesn’t think she’d have noticed the change if she hadn’t been looking closely. She doesn’t even seem to have thought about it before she did it based on how immediately she shoots Eddie a betrayed frown, “I thought you said that was a  _ dog.” _

The boy laughs, like it’s all some joke, Eddie almost wants to join him just solely due to the sheer ridiculousness of the accusation. But then she thinks a little too hard on the fact that these kids don’t even know what a  _ dog _ is and it really stops being funny.

The other Eddie reaches out first, hesitantly running her fingers on top of the dog's little head. He wiggles, tilting his head up and lapping at her wrist, smearing drool over her hand and down her forearm. And she fucking giggles. 

It’s a rough sound, unpracticed and entirely contradictory with everything about herself she’d shown previously, so Eddie doesn’t get why it makes her feel so warm inside. It seems to be just as effective on Richie, who all but melts at it, eyes squinting into something terribly fond as she watches her, like she’s single handedly hanging the moon and the stars in the sky instead of just squishing the drippy jowls of a bulldog. Her girlfriend glances back at her and she cautiously walks over, leaning against her shoulder to pat him on the head despite how obviously unsure she is about it.

That's another thing that's become slightly clearer to Eddie after that night, though she thinks it’s more a matter of she’s finally, actually looking and noticing more than anything she was told. Before she had sort of thought there was an imbalance of power in the relationship, it was easy to look at it that way, based on how the other Eddie mahandles Richie around and can force her to do what  _ she _ wants to do, but looking at it now, big picture, it’s clear Richie isn’t controlled or afraid of what her girlfriend will do if she says no. No, Richie is just hopelessly fucking whipped for her. 

There's some level of a power imbalance, but it isn’t something the other Eddie has taken, instead it was willfully given, handed over because Richie trusted her to take care of it and  _ fuck _ there is just something so touching about the idea of this kid going through hell and still trusting the other enough to let her have control, trusting her enough not to take advantage of her broken edges.

Richie, to be fair, still seems wary around the dog as it waddles over to her, hands drawn awkwardly against her chest the closer it gets. Her Eddie offers her an enthusiastic grin and she lets it bowl clumsily into her lap. 

“I think he likes you!” Orbie’s owner smiles down at her, either blatantly ignoring or blissfully unaware of how the other girl had positioned herself between him and her girlfriend under the ruse of petting the back of the dog’s head, “Look, usually I just gotta tie him up outside but if it’s okay with your mom, do you feel like watching him for me while I pick up my order?”

Both the kids nod, Richie with far less enthusiasm and only after she saw how excitedly her partner agreed, the other Eddie sticking her finger experimentally in between the dogs canines and swirling it experimentally in the bubbly drool.

It takes Eddie a minute to realize the man is looking at her expectantly, that in this situation, to any passerby she is the ‘mom’ who dog watching needs to be okay with.

“Yeah! We’ll uh… take care of your little guy for you, that's fine.” It's hard not to visibly cringe at how awkward it sounds but he just looks grateful, handing Richie the leash (who then immediately loops it around her own Eddie’s wrist, looking incredibly unsure of how to handle it) and heading in.

“Having fun over there?” She asks after a minute, looking over at the kids, the dog licking long, slobbering stripes up Richie’s face that stain through the blue of her mask, her Eddie looking like she can’t decide between trying to monetize those bulldog licks for herself or if she wants to join in on harassing her girlfriend.

“It’s like me!” She laughs when she notices Eddie staring, patting the dog’s back perhaps a bit too hard, but it doesn’t seem bothered.

“Why? Because it’s drippy and gross?” She teases, hoping for some sort of rise but instead she offers her genuinely wide smile before catching herself and schooling it into something a little more sarcastic. Eddie decides that's better than bickering, at least a little bit.

“Yes!” She reaches around Orbie and flaps his jowls with an audible slap, a small string of black goo slipping down her proudly raised chin. Richie looks away from her constant diligence on the dog to shoot her a look she thinks means ‘don’t ruin her fun’, though Eddie cannot differentiate it from her ‘don’t make me listen to another stupid argument’ look.

Eventually the man comes back out, balancing a full tray of drinks and two little brown bagged muffins, one of which he plops down in front of Eddie with a jovial ‘thanks’. They need to pry the other Eddie off of the dog, and the dog off of Richie who it seems he’s grown entirely too attached to despite her clear wariness that persists around him. Eddie teases that he probably thinks she’s a new chew toy and she manages to look utterly flummoxed over why the dog would even want such a thing (because, as Eddie forgot, they don’t know what dogs are...  _ they don’t know what dogs are)  _ while also managing to look incredibly offended as she signs out  _ NOT T-O-Y _ .

“Fine, then, maybe slimy things just like you.” She seems far more flattered at that explanation, even if it gets her a black stained smear up her cheek from her girlfriend, which is either an enthusiastic confirmation of the theory or some particularly obnoxious teasing; knowing her, it's probably both.

“Can we get a dog?” The other Eddie asks eventually, giddy and smearing half dried dog saliva across the rubber toes of her sneakers like she’s anointing them.

“We’re not getting a dog that drooly.”

“But that’s the best part!” She whines, flopping back so the back of her head is leaning against crossed arms, she thunks her legs over Richie’s with a concerningly loud clunk.

“I like bigger dogs anyway.” If she’s being honest she’s always wanted one, she’d just never been allowed between Myran’s instance they only move into dog-free apartment buildings and her mother’s horror stories about children getting their faces eaten off by rabid german shepards. 

Still, she’d always liked Mikes big old sheepdog, used to beg her to let her take him on runs with her and drag him onto her sleeping bag at sleepovers. He’d just been a massive, fluffy sweetheart and she’d never had the trepidation around him her mother had seemed to want, looking back that's probably why she never quite believed her husband’s ideas about big dogs being dangerous. She’s really not against the idea of a dog in the slightest if she thinks about it, she’s just against the idea of more slobber, even if she’s gotten far more accustomed to slimy things in the past few weeks.

“There are  _ bigger dogs? _ ” The aforementioned slimy thing asks, wide eyed and grinning through blackened teeth. She doesn’t seem to notice, or at least she doesn’t seem to find it important enough to translate, as Richie signs what Eddie can only assume is a similar sentiment on the existence of bigger dogs, just significantly less excited about the prospect.

She’s halfway through explaining different dog breeds and discussing their merits for their future dog (one Eddie arguing for something big and good for work outs, the other still stuck entirely on a bulldog, and Richie arguing that they should just get a cat, because apparently these kids  _ do  _ know about cats, which Eddie isn’t going to think hard about) when Eddie realizes for the first time that these kids are going to be part of her future. 

If they notice how her words stall, awkward and relatively inarticulate, before she shuts up all together they don’t let it stop their now one sided (at least auditorily) debate.

She hadn’t really thought about it, the After, it was sort of hard when it seems oh so far away and she wanted it so badly. In retrospect, it's the obvious turn of events, but, somehow, the idea of them still being here once they get to California and (hopefully) settle down hadn’t quite occurred to her. 

This trip, this van, this crushing, stressful dread is all temporary but  _ this _ Richie and  _ this _ Eddie arent. They’ll still be here and she gets to teach them about all the stupid little things that come with freedom they had missed out on; she gets teach them about dogs, take them to pet stores, help Richie get more comfortable around them because theres no way they won’t eventually come home with one, she gets to watch them learn about space, if they want to do the research on their own, she doesn’t know nearly enough about it and she doesn’t get the feeling she’ll be altruistic enough to look things up for them, she gets to pretend she doesn’t notice when they act all sappy and all that’s sort of exciting, in a weird unexpected kind of way. 

It’s also sort of terrifying, suddenly having kids who are her permanent responsibility, not knowing where to toe the line between letting them finally have the normal childhood they never really got to have (the kind of childhood Eddie had always secretly wanted even though she wouldn’t trade what she had with the Losers for the world regardless of the trauma) and going too far, getting them hurt or letting them do stuff stupid enough that they get in serious trouble.

For now she’s content to think about the exciting parts, it’s easier, nicer than all the things she knows can and will go wrong once this all becomes long term.

She pinches off the top of the muffin Orbie’s owner had bought her, blueberry, she hadn’t had blueberries since Myran had read an article once about them causing cancer and then talked about Eddie’s dad, like that was something he was fucking allowed to do, like a potentional genetic predisposition would be brought on by a berry. The muffin isn’t even that good, sort of dry and underbaked all at once, but they clearly didn’t skimp on the blueberries and there is something vindicating about it. 

Though that might just be her good mood putting things, like shitty muffins and annoying kids, in a better perspective. 

It took her several meaningless, casually fun conversations and an eventual stop to rest for the night for her to realize that the other Eddie had stopped glaring at her, and the awkwardness had all but disappated. 

**-**

Eddie had always found it easy to make enemies, people annoyed her and she’d been told she annoyed people. Her list of foes ranged from passive aggressive office rivalries to a long standing feud with the woman from her favorite organic fruit stand who always took the best peaches to an intergalactic child eating clown who literally murdered her by stabbing it’s leg through her chest. 

Regardless she thinks Pennywise has been knocked into second spot on Eddie Kaspbrak’s Official Shit List, right behind the world’s largest garden gnome.

She really had her doubts that it was actually the  _ world's _ largest garden gnome but it’s definitely this  _ city’s _ largest, considering the sheer amount of tacky billboards, adorned with as many bells and whistles they could fit that she thinks are supposed to be impressive but really just come across as sad and kind of desperate, singing its praises every half mile.

“What’s a  _ garden gnome?”  _ The other Eddie had asked, pronouncing it like  _ guh-nome _ , leaning inconveniently over Eddie’s shoulder, one arm hooked through the bottom of the headrest to poke obnoxiously at her neck, and waving her pointed finger towards the sign.

“It’s pronounced  _ gnome,” _ She pretended not to hear the pitched up mocking way the kid parroted  _ ‘it's pronounced gnome’ _ into her ear, “They’re these creepy little glass dudes-”

“Oh, like Richie?” The other Eddie cuts off with a groan that sounds far more offended than pained, withdrawing awkwardly into the back of the van after Richie huffily slams her heel against her calf in retaliation for the jab.

“They aren’t, though, they’re like short and kind of fat and they normally have pointy red hats and beards-” Richie cuts her off, hitting her hand against the ground and, presumably, signing something Eddie doesn’t look off the road for, her counterpart had gotten better at consistently translating as time went on.

“Oh, yeah, we had one of those.”

“You had a… garden gnome?” She doesn’t think she’ll ever really understand these kid’s past in its entirety, not when they keep throwing her curveballs like this. The image of Pennywise lovingly nestling a gnome amongst the yellowed bushes and weed choked, dead blossoms of the crack house garden is so incredibly absurd she almost laughs.

“Yeah, I think someone must have been scared of them once or something.”

“Ah.” She supposed that made more sense than a murderous clown having the same affinity for little ceramic men that the obnoxiously cheerful, apple cheeked old lady who lived next door to her when she was a kid had, “We’re not going, if that's why you pointed it out.”

“Oh, we’re fucking going. Right, Richie?” Richie looks slightly affronted for a moment at being dragged in again but she eventually nods her hand in an affirmative  _ yes. _

“No. Absolutely not.” It’s another unnecessary stop, another obstacle in her fight to get back to Richie. If she didn’t let death stop her from finding her again she’s not going to let a precocious little kid who wants to see a massive hunk of plaster stop her either.

**-**

“World's largest garden gnome! It’s just seven miles! That’s not even that fucking far!”

“You have no clue how miles work.” This incredibly justified statement doesn’t seem to deter her.

“Turn left now!” She draws out the ‘now’, obnoxious and wavering with the same kind of irrational pique you’d find in a toddler protesting bedtime.

“Shut the fuck up.” The other Eddie whines something out, mocking and wordless before plopping into the back, arms slumped on her criss crossed legs. 

She counts it as a win, feeling proud in the cocky sort of way most adults are when they’ve outsmarted a child even if they pretend not to be. She’s just begun to revel in the momentary silence when Richie politely taps her on the shoulder; she slows the car to try to read what is being signed, right now she doesn’t quite trust the other Eddie not to mistranslate to get what she wants.

_ T-U-R-N L-E-F-T now. _

“No! I’m not turning left!” The sheen of her win is beginning to dull, with startling speed and she clings to it, with the desperation that often comes  _ after _ adults win their victory against a child, the kind that spears through the cocky pride with devastating accuracy once they register all they’ve done is give the child a momentary reprieve to either learn how to outsmart them or stumble blindly into victory.

She barely needs to look at the road signs to realize that unless she wants to go the completely wrong direction, drive directly away from the right exit that will bring her closer to her Richie, she needs to turn left. Now. 

It really would discredit a lot of her argument if Richie and Eddie had any actual concept of right and left.

**-**

“Maybe Pennywise killed you because he knew you were the most boring person on the planet.” The other Eddie is fully sprawled out, head resting comfortably in Richie’s lap as she picks slime from under her nails with her teeth. Richie offers her a half smile, something that's probably supposed to be placating but looks far too amused for Eddie’s liking.

“What the  _ fuck _ are you talking about?” 

It doesn’t help that she wasn’t sure how discussing her death was supposed to make her feel. It’s definitely more serious of a topic than the flippant way her counterpart brings it up, but if she actually thinks on it, tries to mourn her own death or figure out the intracies of her own resurrection she just feels nauseous. She settles on ignoring the problem all together.

“I mean… your Richie would probably take us to see the gnome, and we didn’t find  _ her  _ corpse in a sewer. I’m just saying.” She hates that, despite the fact that her statement made almost no sense, she kind of had a point.

Richie probably would have taken the kids to see the world’s largest garden gnome. But ‘Not Boring’ Richie also quoted  _ Die Hard _ and then immediately got her shit rocked by the dead lights so it’s not like her Richie is really the best example of rational decision making. She almost dreads the day when her Richie meets this Eddie.

“Whatever, we’re still not seeing a big gnome.”

“You fucking suck! Why not?” 

“Because I said so!” She’s struck by a moment by how much she sounds like a mom (not  _ her _ mom, obviously, her mom would have cried and asked what she had done to make Eddie hate her, why she never listened to her anymore), she sees for one queasy moment why everyone assumes they’re her kids.

It doesn’t matter, she pretends to shake it off, pretends the thought hadn’t even crossed her mind. 

They aren’t stopping.

**-**

She can feel the slime soaking through her sneakers. 

She can feel her resolve cracking.

She can feel the world’s largest garden gnome breathing down her neck.

The other Eddie had been letting the slime out like a faucet since they passed a sign unhelpfully and incredibly ominously informing them that  _ The Gnome is near, _ Eddie hasn’t even known she could control it like that.

It sort of feels like a temper tantrum, or it would if she didn’t so fucking smug while she was doing it, smirking around a mouthful of puke as she squelched through the slime. It all reminds her a little of the saying Maggie Tozier had been all too fond of saying when they kept her up all night during sleepovers and they had been all too fond of hearing if only for the delight of witnessing an adult cursing; something about being as happy as a pig rolling in it’s own shit.

Richie, the doll, not the one with a mother who enjoyed strange sayings, had taken refuge in the front seat, though, Eddie gets the feeling she hadn’t sat up there to escape the onslaught of slime for any reason other than the fact that she hadn’t wanted to stain her new sweater based on how happily she was splashing at the black puddle that had formed by her feet. She levels her with a blatant look, like she can’t fucking believe she hasn’t snapped yet, the way she cocks her eyebrows almost looks impressed.

Watching the slightly astonished admiration fade into something unsurprised but incredibly entertained as she reluctantly pulls into the parking lot for the World's Largest Garden Gnome makes her losing the battle that much more painful. 

She’s only human, she has her breaking point, and apparently it is the sensation of cold, black tar slopping against her socks like she’d stepped in the world's nastiest puddle, all while a pointy red triangle looms ominously over the tree line.

The other Eddie cheers loudly from the back of the van, her unbearable delight only blocked by how she has to gurgle around a mouthful of slime.

**-**

“This is so boring!” 

Eddie is going to murder a child. Genuinely. She doesn’t know how she’s going to manage it but as she stares down her counterpart, knees caked in black and arms crossed over her chest, she considers what can be used in the van to slaughter her where she stands.

“It's a  _ big gnome _ ! That’s all we were promised! What the hell were you expecting?” 

“The one we had was full of brains! I thought that was a normal gnome thing!” The kid stomps her foot, bottom lip sticking out so slightly she isn’t sure she fully knows she’s doing it, completely unaware of how young and bratty she looks. Eddie hates that the sudden, incredibly disturbing, context makes their whole gnome story so much less confusing.

“It had a  _ brain? _ ”

“No, I’m pretty sure they were like multiple, real brains because they were still there when Pennywise went to sleep, after that all the fun fake stuff disappeared.”

Eddie can’t. She really just cannot, there is far too much to unpack there. The kid doesn’t even seem to notice that she left, too preoccupied with glaring at the gnome like it had personally offended her. (It had, in fact, personally offended all three of them in wildly different ways, but it’s really not all that fair to treat the poor gnome badly because of it, it’s wholly inanimate and has no clue it’s upset them so thoroughly just by its existence alone.)

Richie, visibly disappointed since their arrival but infinitely less annoying about the whole situation, had disappeared to the little storefront full of gnome-themed paraphernalia once she’d convinced her Eddie to let go of her hand, promising that she’d be fine if she wandered away. It was sort of sweet, well, Eddie would have thought it was sweet if she wasn’t so thoroughly annoyed with them both; instead she decided that it was possessive and pretended that made her feel less frustrated about the whole situation. 

Eddie briefly considers, as she walks over to the less obnoxious of the kids, buying her Richie one of the brightly colored, too expensive Largest Gnome in the World t-shirt’s on display with the crumpled fifty in her pocket that the woman who had jumpstarted their car had given her. She thinks it might the kind of thing stupid enough for her Richie to find it funny, she sort of likes the idea of bringing Richie a gift when she reunites with her and then feels stupid for thinking a cartoon gnome printed on fabric was a good ‘would you be my girlfriend’ present.

“Find anything good?” Richie startles at the sudden noise, slamming a decorative lawn gnome too hard against the rim of the barrel full of other small, decorative lawn gnomes. Eddie’s surprised to find when she looks back that her eyes are wide and bright in a way that means she’s smiling, really smiling, the kind where the corners of her lips strain against the stitches and her whole face lights up, it’s sort of hard not to smile with her, “What?”

The figurine misses the barrel when she drops it, bouncing off the side and impaling it point hat down in the soft earth between their feet, Eddie doesn’t even think she notices in her fervor to lift her hands and rotate her pointers around each other, jolty and jointed with excitement.

_ Signing!  _

“What?” Eddie can’t even be proud of herself for understanding what she’s saying so quickly, not when she has absolutely no clue why shes saying it. Richie turns back to where she was staring aimlessly before, waving her hands forward, palms up, blurry with the motion, and arms fully extended in front of her; it takes Eddie a moment to realize she’s not signing but she’s  _ pointing. _

Across from them are a man and a woman, they’re sitting on top of a picnic blanket, an emptied basket between the two of them surrounded by food they’re clearly ignoring. Even from the distance she can recognize their expressions, faces twisted so they look both amused and disappointed all at once, periodically glancing back at the, admittedly, amusing and disappointing gnome.    
But Richie isn’t excited about deli sandwiches gathering flies on a picnic blanket or the general solidarity found throughout the clearing over the pathetic excuse for a world record breaker; she’s excited for the way the couple is talking to one another, fingers moving so rapidly through signs that Eddie can already tell she’d be lost.

“Oh, that’s cool!” 

Richie looks incredibly disappointed in her lack of response, slamming her hands against the barrel and rotating her pointers again before throwing an arm towards the pair, tugging down her mask for a moment so she can scowl at her properly.

“Put that back on! Right fucking now! And… and don’t  _ point at people!” _ She thinks as she says it, a little bitterly, that these children have absolutely none of the training in common courtesy everyone gets from their parents when they’re little, or if your Eddie Kaspbrak, gets from your best friends parents because your mother doesn’t like bringing you in public places with other people in them so you never quite got the chance to learn. She tugs up the mask for her and Richie flinches away, which makes some of her misguided frustration dissipate, not all of it but enough to back off.

Richie indignantly slams her hands again, like she’s incredibly disappointed in Eddie for not seeing how world shiftingly, ground breakingly, life changing this phenomena she’s showing her is.

“Fine! They’re signing! I said it was cool!” She huffs at Eddie through her nose and turns her back on her, walking closer to the couple, and peeking at them incredibly unsubtly from around a rack of gnome themed tote bags. Eddie gets the feeling she’s just been dismissed.

The woman notices her after a while, longer than it should have taken given how badly she’s hiding, but eventually she leans too far forward, toppling the unsteady bag stand and the resulting flurry of bright, red cone hat and white beard patterned bags and bright pink clothed child manages to get her attention. She taps the man on the shoulder, quickly signing something, with the incredibly specific look of someone resigning themselves to humoring people in a way they’re, reluctantly, used to.

She waves to get her attention, almost-annoyance shifting into something slightly kinder when Richie sits up and she seems to notice that she’s a kid. Richie holds her hands close for a minute, cocking her head like she’s considering how to deal with the situation, before offering her a shy, small wave in return. 

_ Hi! You sign? _

The woman signs it slowly, like she’s talking to an incredibly small child (or a forty year old woman named Eddie Kaspbrak, who's just thrilled to be understanding) but Richie doesn’t look as offended as she had expected her to at what feels like an almost condescending gesture.

Instead she freezes, shoulders jolting up to her ears as she glances anxiously back at Eddie, who offers her a slightly confused thumbs up, watching bemused as she pops back around to face the couple and responds with a reverent  _ yes. _

The woman moves her pointer between her ear and mouth, head tilted like she’s asking a question, but Richie pauses. It's not like when she had seconds before, when she just seemed far too shocked to form words; this time she just looks entirely lost (and if she’s lost Eddie has absolutely no chance of helping her, what with her rudimentary ASL crash course knowledge). 

_ What? _ Her signing dips slightly choppy, like she’s realizing all of a sudden that she’s talking to strangers, that she should be hesitant. The woman seems a little confused at  _ her _ confusion, signing it twice more before fingerspelling it out letter by letter, sharing a pointed, flummoxed look with the man next to her that Eddie can’t even begin to figure out

_ D-E-A-F?  _

Richie spells it out slowly to herself, hands close enough to her face that her fingers flick at the bottom of the frames of her glasses, like she expects it to suddenly make sense from sheer proximity. 

She eventually, painfully thoughtful as she presses her middle and pointer finger against her thumb, signs out  _ No? _

It is then that Eddie realizes, belatedly enough, that Richie has absolutely no clue what being deaf is. It makes sense, obviously, she only needs to know sign language because her lips a stitched shut and it’s not like she had too many resources to educate her on the cultural impact and importance of ASL for the Deaf Community, but still, the couple doesn’t know that and suddenly Eddie is a little wary of letting Richie talk to them at all.

The man rolls his flattened pointer finger away from his chin, a sign Richie clearly doesn’t know either as she awkwardly brings her hands up and just holds them there. 

_ You know ASL why? _ The man asks in the same toddler-slow, condescending way, like he’s starting to doubt she knows more than a few words. 

Eddie gets the feeling, from Richie’s body language, it’s actually managing to frustrate her this time, Eddie doesn’t really know whether or not she should swoop in and help, all her instincts are telling her to but she doesn’t really want to overstep her boundaries and deal with a grumpy, porcelain preteen.

Luckily, Richie manages to piece some of it together and quickly informs them that she is unable to talk and the conversation smooths out from there. Eddie hesitantly waves her over to them when they offer to let them sit with her. She’s reluctant to let anyone really look at the kids too closely, there's not much hiding their ball joints and slime stained teeth from close up but if this trip has taught her anything it’s that people are willing to write off a lot more weird bullshit on their own accord than Eddie ever thought even after living in New York. 

Well, that and the fact that Richie seems to be enjoying herself and she’d be loath to ruin her fun.

“Who the fuck is she talking to? Why aren’t you over there with her?” Eddie turns around to her counterpart, glaring over her shoulder vaguely in the direction where her girlfriend was sitting, looking a little as though she was planning the best way to storm over there and defend Richie at the first sign of trouble.

“Gnome got too boring?” She leans back against the barrel next to her, going for nonchalant indifference and hoping the other Eddie doesn’t notice how she’s also been keeping a close eye on Richie across the field.

“You didn’t answer my  _ question!  _ Why would you even- wait, are they signing?” Some of her bravado seems to deflate a little, softening into uncertainty, still slightly frustrated but it sort of feels more like she’s being angry just for anger's sake.

“Yes?” 

“Oh. I… I didn’t know other people knew how to do that.” Oh.  _ Oh.  _ She hadn’t really thought about that, hadn’t even known it was the kind of thing she  _ needed  _ to think about; the fact that the couple were the first two people Richie had ever seen speaking her own language. Now that it’s right in front of her, the whole idea unfurls rather terribly in her mind, slightly overwhelmed with the unsettling implications. Neither of the Eddie’s even really signed, they just understood (one far more so than the other), they didn’t really need to, she could hear just fine, but now, watching how happy she is, fingers almost blurry from a distance with her enthusiasm, Eddie is beginning to wonder if they should have been. 

She’s beginning to wonder if this is the first time Richie has ever had a full conversation where someone signed back, if when they were learning her counterpart had tried to sign with her or had just focused on understanding, if it feels lonely, being the only person speaking silently when everyone else can scream. 

“Go over there and make sure she isn’t spilling any clown secrets.” She swats her counterpart’s shoulder, pretending, for her sake, not to see her obvious discomfort with the distance between her and her girlfriend. She’d either get embarrassed or defensive if she pointed out the way she’s bouncing on the balls of her feet like she’s raring for a fight, fists clenched and the corners of her mouth starting to blacken, and Eddie isn’t really looking for a real fight right now.

“You trust  _ me _ not to spill any clown secrets?” She raises one eyebrow shifting all her weight to one leg and crossing her arms, it’s the most stereotypically shitty teenager pose she’s ever seen and Eddie wants to laugh because she doesn’t even know how easily she’s conforming to steryotypes. 

“Fucking  _ don’t.  _ We’re leaving soon anyway, so say your goodbyes to your best friend.” She gestures grandly to the gnome, which gets both her and the oversized lawn decoration flipped off but it’s almost worth it for the way the kids face splits into a relieved smile as she bounds across the lawn. She tugs Richie protectively against her side, making her hands falter mid sentence. Richie plays at exasperated, shaking her hands to reset the sentence and introduce her Eddie, but she’s not fooling either of her travel companions with how readily she leans into her girlfriend’s touch.

They don’t end up leaving for another twenty minutes, despite Eddie’s preplanned fifteen minute gnome limit, Richie just looks far too happy and she can’t bring herself to stop them until it becomes clear the couple is definitely reaching the end of their ‘talking to random children’ quota but are too polite to tell them to go away.

(She buys her Richie a t-shirt before she can overthink it, it’s stupid and tacky and has a poorly drawn version of the big gnome right in the center, it’s perfect.)

“Have fun?” She asks once their back on the road, Richie sprawled flat on her stomach on the floor of the van and happily beaming up at her through the mirror. She nods her hand in an enthusiastic  _ yes, _ nestling her head on top of one of her arms, giddly cycling her fingers on one hand through new signs. She looks far happier than Eddie thinks she's seen her this whole trip and suddenly no part of her regrets caving in and stopping

“I still think the gnome should have been cooler.” The other Eddie pouts, still clearly mourning the loss of her expected gnome viscera, but with less heat, she barely needs to look back to know she’s staring at Richie. Her good mood is infectious, seeping into every corner of the van and getting stuck in the hard to reach places. 

Eddie often spends time thinking about how different the two Richie’s are, clinging to the reassuring contrast of this kid and her Richie Tozier, but there are moments like this when a similarity makes itself so clear that it’s almost painful; ripping at the badly healed, temporary wound that is Richie Tozier. 

Richie’s good moods, her real good moods, not all the times she’d pretend to be happy when she wasn’t because she had bullshit ideas of what her role in their group was supposed to be, seemed to spread like wildfire until everyone was grinning. There was differences, of course, to this Richie and her Richie’s good mood; with her Richie it was the overwhelming burst of positive energy that came when someone already bright eyed and bushy tailed let their eyes suddenly get brighter and tail suddenly get bushier; this Richie being excited felt slower, warmer, the moment where you suddenly get a genuine smile out of someone who is normally reserved. She spends a moment trying to decide which she preferred, but it doesn’t take long to realize that she can’t, they’re both too different and they’re both too good.

“Gnomes will never be cool, get over it.” She shoots back at the other Eddie, eventually.

_ “You’ll _ never be cool.” She grumbles and Richie snorts into her elbow, which feels far more like a betrayal than the actual insult had.

“Shut up, asshole.” 

**-**

It starts with an argument. The petty kind of argument they’d been having since Maine if not just as an excuse to fill the time and the silence. If you asked Eddie she honestly probably wouldn’t have been able to tell you what it was about, something about gum wrappers and littering that neither truly had that strong of an opinion on, other than the fact that the other Eddie was wrong. These little arguments sometimes, now that they have reached some sort of weird understanding, stay where they began, bickering and light insults that ends when Richie gets tired of it and makes as much noise as possible until they are annoyed enough to stop.

This one doesn’t stay that small. It escalates into something personal faster than Richie can stop them and even as Eddie lets her exhausted frustration overtake her, shooting back just as viciously as her counterpart is dealing it, she gets the feeling that it will only end poorly. 

“You don’t even know jack shit about us! You can’t tell us what to fucking do!” 

“Clearly I can’t because you don’t listen when I try!”

“Wow, you’re finally getting it!” She has this tone, sticky sweet and babyish, that grates on Eddie’s nerves more than anything else. It sounds too much like how her mother used to talk to her, petting her hair too hard as she cried, forcing her to dry swallow pills while she explained condescendingly that she needed them because she was  _ sick. _ It sounds too much like Myran calling her cute when she got angry with him. It sounds too much like people talking about her like she is a little girl and not a grown fucking woman. 

“You’re such a piece of shit.” Eddie grinds it out and the other cackles, she knows she’s winning, she’s fucking gloating, prodding at Eddie’s exposed buttons with careless euphoria like it’s her favorite way to pass the time.

“Has anyone  _ ever  _ listened to you? Has anyone ever even  _ cared _ about you? I can’t see how, you’re so fucking annoying.” 

“Well, at least the only person that cares about me and  _ I _ care  _ about _ isn’t a fucking doll who I can force to do whatever I want!” Eddie isn’t proud of it, it’s a low blow, not even a very eloquent one at that, and she knows it. They try to avoid roping Richie into their arguments, mainly because they both have a debilitating soft spot for her (at least for Eddie some of ‘not dragging Richie into fights’ also has to do with the fact that she, without a doubt, will always side with her girlfriend). It’s not even true, Richie has far more agency than the claim gives her credit for, but it’s easy and it’s cutting and it spills out before she can swallow it back.

Eddie can’t see, eyes focused on the road (eyes focused on nothing at all, too blurred by anger and angry tears), but Richie’s hand wavers just above Eddie’s shoulder from where she was planning to grab it, ready to stop the fight before it gets bad enough to break something. She drops her hand and stares at the back of Eddie’s headrest instead, it’s just for a single, shocked and horribly offended moment, but it’s still a moment too long.

“Fuck you! At least I the person I care about didn’t leave my body in a fucking sewer! At least I don’t just care about a fucking  _ jacket!” _

Buttons are no longer being pushed, buttons are being slammed and broken and painfully toyed with, there really isn’t any going back and all three of them know it.

As if to emphasize her point, slime slowly trailing down from the corner of her lip in a wobbly way that means she’s holding more goo in than she’s letting out, she stands up and snatches Richie’s jacket from where it’s been sitting, balled up and all but ignored, in the front seat from when it got too warm. She dangles it teasingly in between two stained fingers through the mirror, grinning dangerously like she’s already won but is still too livid to stop fighting.

“Give it back.” 

“No! Fuck you!” She scrambles to the back of the van and Richie hesitantly tucks her feet under her knees and stands, slightly crouched, signing something both are too angry to try and translate. 

“Give it back right  _ fucking now _ you little  _ shit!” _

She knows she’s being dramatic, that there is no fucking reason a dilapitdated leather jacket should be the one thing so critically tipping the scale away from a mental breakdown, but knowing does jack shit for the fact that it  _ is  _ the only thing keeping her sane.

That jacket is the only thing she has to remind her why she’s even doing this, it’s the closest thing she has to her Richie right now and she needs it  _ back. _

“God, you’re so  _ pathetic,  _ you know that right?” She snaps her eyes back onto the road before she can let on how much that hurt her, she’s not giving her counterpart the satisfaction of watching her face crumple against her will.

The other Eddie scoffs, a sound too bitterly cutting to be coming from the same girl who loved the stars and lost her mind over a bulldog and kissed her girlfriend gently on the forehead when she thought Eddie wasn’t looking; she wonders if she’s always had the capability to be this mean, she wonders if that should scare her. 

The whole van seems to echo with the click of the younger Eddie forcing the back doors open.

Eddie doesn’t even need to look through the mirror to see that she’s holding Richie’s jacket above the speed-blurred street below them, same manic, victorious smile playing at her blackened lips.

She’s driving too fast, she always does when they have these arguments, like all her anger is stored in her left foot, forcing it hard against the pedal. Normally, it’s not a problem, not until this time, when she slams on the brakes, the idea of Richie’s jacket scraping away over the asphalt and under car tires cutting through all her rational thought. The other Eddie yelps, hands snapping to the top of the back door frame to keep from falling out as she lurches with the floor under her feet, jacket still clenched awkwardly between her palm and the wall, one arm of it flapping in her face. 

“Give it back. Now.”

“Come and take it.” Some sort of switch had been flipped, when one Eddie stole the jacket and the other stopped the car, dangerously close to the kind of fight that, if Eddie was still twelve and full of suppressed rage, would end with bruised knuckles and insincere apologies. 

(Neither heard the sharp crack, muffled by a fluffy, pink sweater sleeve, in the back of the van when it lurched to a stop and their third passenger fell, one Eddie far too preoccupied with trying not to fall herself to notice the noise her ears were upsettingly well attuned to and the other unaware she had to listen for it at all.)

Eddie doesn’t even pull over, just slams her door so hard it shakes the whole van and storms to the back, whole body quivering with anger she can’t contain fully inside, so instead she forces it out by ranting; livid rambles that don’t mean anything substantial and she wouldn’t be able to repeat if asked, fully running on a healthy amount of autopiloted rage.

“I cannot  _ believe _ you-” She rounds the back corner just in time to watch over her counterpart’s hair as Richie, face barely twisted in a grimace, lifts her right arm and the length of her forearm, broken off in a shattered slant, slumps out of her sleeve and rolls onto the floor,  _ “Oh my god!” _

Both girls snap their heads up at her. The younger Eddie looks like she isn’t sure if showing her confusion will undermine her pretty solidly built up anger. Richie just seems lost on why she’s being stared at, which Eddie thinks is a little uncalled for considering Richie’s arm just  _ fell off. _

“Her fucking  _ arm!” _ Eddie chokes as descriptively as she can, which is to say, not at all but Eddie thinks that's fair enough due to the circumstances. The other blinks at her for a moment before turning around to take in the scene.

“Oh. She’s fine.” The way her voice shakes is incredibly telling for how fine she  _ actually  _ thinks the whole situation is but Eddie is far too stressed to discern tone and the dismissal sparks something angry and unexpectedly protective inside of her.

“You think this is  _ fine? _ Holy fucking shit what the fuck is wrong with you?!” She scrambles into the van, hands hovering between the girl’s remaining, jagged stump and her broken off appendage before she just settles on both and waves them in each hand with a panicked helplessness. 

“She’ll… she’ll fix herself! She’s fine! It’s all your fault anyway!” The other Eddie spins decisively into a squat, yanking Richie roughly away from Eddie’s worried hands. She keeps glaring a hole through Eddie’s skull, not even looking away to check on the uncomfortable looking girl held against her bent knees.

“How the hell is this my fault!” She grabs Richie’s upper arm and shakes it to audibly emphasize her point. The other Eddie tugs her back. It quickly delves into a frustrating tug of war between the two as they yank the doll into their arms, all managing to look, overwhelmingly, like two preschoolers arguing over an incredibly disgruntled looking toy.

“You shouldn’t have stopped the van so fast!”

“You shouldn’t have stolen my fucking jacket, then!” 

Both are too wrapped up in their argument to notice the one arm they are not fighting over is raised and desperately trying to sign something to them, neither taking account of the way Richie is slamming her feet against the floor to try and get their attention. If Eddie wasn’t hyper focused on the shattered limb she would have noticed how it had all crested into a temper tantrum of sorts, a child without the words to communicate still trying to get her point across with as much shaking and thrashing and banging as she could manage but  _ no one is listening _ . 

She stands, all too abruptly so the loose elbow joint rattles helplessly as it snaps out of her girlfriend’s hold, shoving her one hand in front of her and bringing her four fingers loudly against her thumb, pointed and angry.  _ Shut Up. _

“Richie-”

_ Shut Up. Shut Up. Shut Up. _

“Look what you did! She’s upset now!” Eddie hisses and her counterpart looks livid, snapping her gaze away from where Richie is trying to one-handed sign something neither are really paying quite enough attention to. 

Both are still too focused on each other to see how incredibly hurt Richie looks when her girlfriend ignores her, the way she holds the word she was in the middle of fingerspelling, bouncing it pathetically twice before dropping both arms all together and storming out of the van.

If anything, at least she finally gets their attention.

“Richie! Come back here right the fuck now!” Eddie snaps, worry bubbling up in her stomach before she can think it through, because they’re on the side of the road, anything could fucking happen and all of a sudden the kid seems far more breakable now that she’s actually seen her break. 

She doesn’t seem to appreciate the concern, and instead whirls around, swiping the back of her hand out from under her chin to the van.  _ Fuck You. _

(I’ll let you in on a little secret neither Eddie, nor any other human on the planet knows: Being ignored makes dolls feel even more like dolls.

Now, normally this isn’t a problem, as dolls are inanimate figures and can’t really care about feeling more like a doll because that is just what they are. Figurines rarely have a strong opinion on such matters, and inanimate objects are rarely annoyed by rude behavior. 

Unfortunately, the line between human and inanimate object sort of wavers for the version of Richie Tozier made of porcelain and ball joints and moldy milk glass eyes. 

She’s objectively a doll, but one could argue that she was also a living, breathing person. It’s really up to your own interpretation which side of the spectrum she falls closer to. You might want to consider Richie’s feelings on the whole matter before you make your decision, just as common courtesy, if you care about that sort of thing. 

You might want to think further about the implications of Pennywise taking away her sentience as a punishment. It isn’t something she prefers and, sometimes, when no one is listening because they are too busy fighting, too busy ignoring her, the fear that the monster she thought was dead is somehow back to take away the one thing she has, takes the place of any rational thought. 

After the fear has clawed its way up her chest, raking inch deep claw marks in her stability, she remembers that she can still move and all that fear curdles unpleasantly to anger and offense and something she can’t quite place except that it hurts. But neither Eddie really knows about that and both Eddies ignored her and sometimes, Richie decides, you just need to get  _ away  _ from the problem before it makes you feel even less like a person.

So, not fully thinking it through, she runs away.)

Eddie grabs the other girl’s shoulder when she tries to chase after Richie and she turns back to her, still struggling, eyes wide with Eddie thought would be anger but instead is just fear.

“We need to go  _ after her!” _ She gesticulates wildly to the street behind them where Richie is no longer even visible. She was fast, apparently, even though she looks like she shouldn’t be with her knobby knees and wobbly, too long legs; Eddie doesn’t want to think about what she’s had to run from that made her get so good at it.

“We  _ will, _ just… give her a minute.” The kid looks at her, completely incredulous when she climbs back into the driver's seat, leaving the doors open and the other Eddie just standing in the street as she starts to drive.

_ “You’re just fucking leaving? You fucking ASSHOLE!”  _

Yeah, okay she probably should have told her she was just pulling over to the side of the road, but in all fairness it’s not like she’s done anything this whole trip to show that she’s good at communication.

The kid doesn’t chase the van, glaring at her from the middle of a road with her arms crossed and black foaming from her mouth as she shouts obscenities at her, not stopping when it’s obvious Eddie isn’t leaving. It sort of hurts, how quickly she’d assumed Eddie was just abandoning them, but more fighting isn’t going to help right now so she swallows back the defensiveness that bubbles up in the back of her throat.

“I’m going to look for her!”

“No, you're going to come here!” The other stomps her foot, not moving in the direction of Eddie or where Richie had run, looking suddenly unsure of what she needs to do, “You’re going to get hit by a car!”

“Maybe I  _ want  _ to get hit by a car. Bitch.” She grumbles too loudly, storming back to the van and tapping her foot expectantly in front of the driver’s side.

“I’m going to find her why the fuck are we just  _ waiting around?” _ That’s a fair enough question, one Eddie doesn’t really have an answer for even though she doesn’t want to concede on that point. Part of her feels like they’re still stuck in their initial argument, a prize for winning dangling uselessly over both their heads. Instead of answering, she just slowly opens her car door, gently pushing the other Eddie to the side when she refuses to move and staring at her through the still open window.

“I’ll go look for her, stay in the car.” She closes the door and turns to where Richie had run off, squinting like she’d be able to see her regardless of how unrealistic it is. The other Eddie grabs her arm before she can walk away, grip tight enough that it feels like she’s trying to force her fingerprints into Eddie’s elbow.

“I’m coming.”

“No,  _ you _ are going to stay in the van in case she comes back and not distract me or get lost yourself.” She explains it the way she thinks she might to a particularly annoying young child, the voice that usually made kids cry even if she didn’t mean for them to, but  _ this _ child just slams the rubber toe of her sneaker against her shin. It’s far more obnoxious than it actually hurts but she doubles over to rub at it anyway.

“ _ Ow!  _ What the  _ fuck?!” _ She spots through her legs the beat up soles of the other Eddie’s sneakers booking it down the street. Luckily for her, they are far more matched for speed, both short legged and weighed down with inconvenient things like organs and unpleasantly sticky mystery slime, and she catches up rather quickly, grabbing her in a backwards hug and doing her best to escort the thrashing child into the back of the van.

_ “Let me go! I need to find her! She’s never been alone before and she’s hurt and she’s gonna hurt herself more so let me go!” _

Eddie knows, objectively, that it would just be easier at this point to let her come, and if she had been more focused on what the kid was saying as opposed to forcefully dragging her back to the van, probably looking like some haggard roadside kidnapper, she would have realized she was making some pretty solid points. Unfortunately for absolutely everyone involved, somewhere in between the jacket stealing and the breaking and the missing child, Eddie began to get overwhelmed. Itchy, bottled up anxiety bursting it’s way up her tense shoulders before rapidly down spiralling through her sternum. 

“You,  _ neither _ of you, know what's out there! If you go out there two you’ll get lost and then I’ll need to look for both of you and then you’ll probably get found out or hurt or killed and then… then… I don’t know but it’ll be bad! Do you want to die? Do you want  _ her  _ to die?” Catastrophizing has always been her specialty and clearly death hasn’t made her rusty if how instantly upset the kid looks is any indication. 

She feels a little guilty for freaking her out, but despite the tonal shift of the day both are still angry with the other, that much is clear, so one Eddie curls against the back of the passenger seat, slime slopping down her chin, and uncurls the middle finger of her girlfriend’s severed arm and the other retaliates over her shoulder as she walks away. 

And that’s fine. 

It is, definitively, not fine, it’s incredibly dysfunctional, but that's not something they can fix at the present. They are two of the same person, hot headed and emotional, but just different enough that they grate against the other’s exposed wires, it’s a recipe for disaster and there are only two people on the planet capable of balancing them out. Unfortunately, one had just run off, broken and hurt and angry, and the other is mourning a death that didn’t fully come to pass all the way out in California. 

So, for now, that’s fine.

Eddie finds Richie easily enough, it seems as though she’d just run far and straight ahead until she felt she had significant distance from the Eddies, which is incredibly understandable given the circumstances. Eddie is pretty sure she’s in the back end of someone’s yard, she can see a house just over the hill Richie is curled up pouting at the base of but all the lights are off and she doesn’t think the kid will take too kindly to being told what to do right now so she just sits next to her, hands folded nervously in her lap. She doesn’t acknowledge her appearance, just scoots away, not enough that there’s much distance between them, but it makes her point, loud and clear. She’s definitely still upset with them.

“Are you okay?” 

Richie lifts her broken arm before freezing, staring at the missing limb extended between them like it’s mocking her. She huffs in frustration through her nose, dropping the offending limb and hitting her remaining hand flat against her chest.  _ Fine. _

“Really? Because you don’t look very fine.” She glares at her, Eddie gets the feeling she’d be on the receiving end of an incredibly petulant stuck-out tongue if it was possible. Slowly, so clearly reluctant it almost concerns her, Richie lifts her hand and cups it on the top of her shoulder, slumping down as she drags it to the middle of her chest. 

“I’m sorry I don’t-” Her face crumples into something defeated and Eddie feels so incredibly guilty, like, years ago, by listening to her mother and not taking sign language in college she was just winding up her foot to kick this adorably disgusting, porcelain puppy in the face. 

_ T-I-R-E-D _

“Oh. Do you… can you even sleep?” She doesn’t really know how these kids work just yet. She knows her counterpart will occasionally take naps when they’ve gone a particularly long time without stopping. She’s an extremely loud snorer (something she takes pride in apparently and, honestly, Eddie can’t fault her for it based on the sheer amount of slime that she must be congested with) but everytime she looks back to confirm if the quieter of the two was asleep she never was, always awake and nestled tightly in her girlfriend’s arms like an unenthusiastic teddy bear.

Richie confirms, signing slowly enough that Eddie almost thinks she’s being condescending, that she can sleep, she just doesn’t  _ like to. _ Apparently neither of them need it, which makes enough sense even if thinking about it for too long makes Eddie’s head hurt.

“You just don’t like it?” She asks, fully aware that she’s going to get less out of this conversation than she would with the other Eddie, if not solely due to the language barrier.

She signs something quickly, almost sarcastically, fingerspelling it slowly when Eddie looks confused.

_ W-O-U-L-D you? _

‘Would you?’ What a fucking question. It takes her a minute to actually understand it. 

Would you still like sleeping if you didn’t need it? Would you still like sleeping if you had lived your whole life walking on eggshells in case the clown who controls you decides you need to go inanimate for a bit. Would you still like sleeping if you were unaware of how much of your life you missed out on, but fully aware of the possibilities that at some point you could just never wake up. 

(She doesn’t know about her two years spent asleep. She doesn’t  _ know _ .)

Eddie decides that, no, she wouldn’t like sleeping if that was her life.

God, that was so fucking horrifying.

“Yeah okay. I get it.” She does, really. She doesn’t quite think Richie was talking about the sort of tired that could be solved by a good night’s sleep, anyway, she was talking about something a bit deeper. Eddie thinks she can almost see how worn out she looks, even if she really isn’t all that expressive; she feels bad even if it probably isn’t her fault, at least not all of it, but it’s not like she’s been the easiest travel companion.

Richie presents her one hand helplessly, waving it as if to say something before tugging her legs back up to her chest and hooking her elbows over her knees.

The quiet that falls over them is heavy, palpably awkward and uncomfortable. She realizes, slightly shamefaced, she hadn’t quite gotten the chance to know this version of Richie as much as she’d gotten to know her counterpart, hadn’t quite bothered because she was quiet and relatively unobtrusive. 

She’d been playing right into the insecurities and fears of being ignored that had created this Richie in the first place, and she desperately needs to right the wrong.

“You know… I broke my arm once too.” Richie looks up at her, head cocked and expression unreadable, suddenly Eddie is regretting opening her mouth without planning exactly what she is going to say in advance, “Not… like that, obviously,” She pictures, for just a moment, if she  _ had _ broken her arm like that, her mother’s face at her coming home with half her arm missing, just slopped off and toted around in her unbroken hand like a useless, bloody toy, it’s wild enough to make her almost wish she had, but also, when she thinks about it for more than a second, very very glad she hadn’t. 

“What I’m trying to say is, like, I sort of understand? God, I don’t even know. Am I helping?” Richie lets an amused huff through her nose, shaking her head no ever so slightly. Eddie thinks she sees the corners of her lips quirk upwards before she turns her head back to stare at her lap. She brings one hand up and starts prodding absently at the slightly jagged points of her remaining forearm, Eddie slaps her hand away and Richie shoves her off, looking entirely affronted.

“Stop poking at it!” She scolds and Richie offers her a look is so blatant Eddie can read her without her having to lift her remaining hand, like she’s trying to genuinely ask what the fuck she thinks is going to happen if she pokes at her hollow glass arm. Eddie doesn’t really have an answer to that one.

“Ready to go back to the van?” She considers the idea for a moment, looking up from her arm and resting her chin against the now free palm, before firmly shaking her head, “We won’t fight anymore, I promise.” 

Richie snorts at that, the noise sounding somehow sarcastic despite just being air blown harshly through her nose, as if she’s saying  _ uh huh, sure you won’t.  _ Eddie can’t help but laugh too.

“That’s fair enough… I’m sorry you broke. Don’t think I said that back there.”

_ Fine. _

It is, however, obviously  _ not  _ fine. Eddie gets the same sick feeling she got a few days ago when the van was broken down and her counterpart was dismissing the idea of someone forcing her to suffocate as a punishment like it was nothing.

“It’s not fine. It doesn’t need to be.”

_ Fine. _ Her hand wavers in the air momentarily as she tries to figure out how to say something with her sudden handicap before spelling it out.  _ N-O-R-M-A-L. _

These kids are far too used to things they shouldn’t be used to, if Eddie wasn’t certain the clown was already dead she thinks she might turn the van right around and go back to Derry so she could kick his ass one more time. Richie slowly lets her head rest against Eddie’s shoulder and something warm unfurls, cutting through the thick smog of her anger. 

She tries not to think about how protective she’s become of these two little assholes after a few weeks of knowing each other. Somehow, after the first few days with them was spent struggling to even think of them  _ as  _ kids, she’s begun to think of them as  _ her  _ kids and that is… that is terrifying.

She’s not mother material, not that she thinks of herself as their mother, she isn’t, she doesn’t fucking know what she is or what is slowly growing between her and the girls. Something inside her, bright and optimistic in a way she rarely can bring herself to be, points out that, after all of this, calling them her kids feels slightly more accurate than just thinking of them as kids she’s traveling with; not that she knows how or why or what to do about it. 

“Does it hurt?” She gestures helpfully at her broken appendage and Richie shakes her head no, but she pauses, considering, for just long enough that Eddie doesn’t quite believe her. 

She shifts Richie more comfortably against her side, nails echoing dull clanks down her hollow arm through her sleeve as she drums something barely rhythmic against it in a way she hopes is even slightly comforting.

Richie’s shoulders start to shake, a tentative, jolty quiver like her body is trying to let something out but doesn’t quite know how. It’s incredibly disconcerting, especially with the way Richie has buried her face in between her own knees and Eddie’s arm.

“Are you… are you crying?” The shaking doesn’t stop but she snaps her head up, succinctly signing  _ can’t  _ before drawing her arm across her chest to grab at what's left of the broken one. 

“Yeah… you can.” Richie shakes her head hard, like Eddie misunderstood. A little bit of her did, too preoccupied with realizing how obvious it is that this literal porcelain child wouldn’t have tear ducts, but the other part understood perfectly, “Even if you like… can’t make tears, you’re allowed to cry.”

There is a moment, thick with emotion Eddie doesn’t even want to begin to unpack, Richie’s hand hovering like she wants to say something before she crumples back between her knees and Eddie’s side, shoulders quivering roughly, silently other than the eventual thud of Richie’s shoes tapping against the grass in tandem with the beat Eddie patterns into her sleeve once her dry sobs subside. It’s nice, in a fucked sort of way, all it took was a broken arm for her to feel like she can understand this version of Richie, as quietly reserved as she is, a little bit better. 

A while after she’s calmed down, Richie lurches out of her arm, eyes wide and breathing too labored for a person Eddie was pretty sure didn’t need to breathe. 

_ Where’s Eddie? _

She doesn’t use her Eddie’s name sign, instead she draws her closed fist, thumb slightly raised, over her heart. It takes a moment for Eddie to recognize it one handed, normally the other fist mirrors the first, but she understands quickly enough. Richie uses it enough that it’s basically a second version of the other girl’s name, as the other Eddie put it, it’s ‘a fucking disgustingly cutesy way of calling me her girlfriend’. (She’d clarified that it was essentially Richie calling her sweetheart, saying the pet name like it was something abhorrent, Eddie thinks she likes it more than she lets on.)

“She’s back at the van, why?” Richie circles her pointer under her chin, fingerspelling quickly when it’s clear Eddie doesn’t understand the sign; too quickly, she has to keep repeating it.

_ A-L---? _

_ A-L--E? _

_ A - L - O - N- E?  _ She signs finally, painstakingly slowly and eyebrows furrowed in frustration.

“Yeah, I mean as long as she listened to me for once.” She sort of says it as a joke but Richie doesn’t seem amused, implications Eddie can’t conceive suddenly dawning on her if her wide eyes and anxiously fast fingers have anything to say about it. 

_ Eddie not like A-L-O-N-E. _

She, all of a sudden, feels stupid, she knew this, she had been  _ told _ this and she’d left her alone. She wants to ask how Richie knows that, she had gotten the impression that her counterpart wanted to keep all of her bad feelings hidden from her girlfriend, but maybe they both underestimated Richie’s powers of observation. Or maybe there is more to the story than just the horrible two year secret.

Richie stands in front of her, offering her remaining hand to help Eddie up and looking terribly offended when she doesn’t take it. She grabs her hand anyway as they’re walking, shaking off her previous dismissal, and lets Eddie guide her back to the van.

When they get back she’s still there, Eddie wasn’t sure she would be based on her past proclivity to do the opposite of what she was told. She feels a little guilty at the fact that she had scared her enough to actually stay put but, the small, hard, judgmental part of her supposes, it’s better than the alternative.

Though, there is something sobering about the image of the kid, legs swinging from where they dangle out the back of the van, hands shaking enough that the ball joint of her girlfriend’s arm rattles audibly from where it’s clenched in her hands. 

She looks too small, Eddie thinks (or maybe she looks just as small as she normally is, another part of her, just as small and judgemental but, just maybe, a little softer considers, maybe this is what is hidden under layers of bravado and protectiveness she disguises as confidence.)

“Richie!” She scrambles out of the van, discarding her arm carelessly so half of it, wrist bent awkwardly in an upside down v, dangles off the edge. She wraps her quickly in a hug, with an earnest lack of abandon that makes Richie stumble to catch her weight, before thwacking her hard on the back of the head, “Don’t  _ fucking  _ do that, you aren’t  _ allowed _ to do that dickwad, I’m so fucking mad at you!”

She isn’t really mad, not from what Eddie can tell. Well, she probably is, but it’s more concern and fear than anything truly angry. Flicking her temple and shoving her in the van, dragging her into her lap as she curses her out; it’s all her fucked up way of showing her worry and Richie clearly knows it by how easily she succumbs to getting tossed around like a ragdoll.

It’s sort of amusing to be watching the interaction from the outside as she starts to drive again, listening to what was a thorough chewing out of Richie for running as it somehow turns against the Eddies for making her feel like she had to run in the first place.

“Well  _ that’s _ her fault!” The clicking of Richie fingerspelling was softer than when she signed with both hands, longer gaps between sounds when she could actually sign a word one handed. 

“Shut the fuck up. Fine. I’m  _ sorry.”  _ It’s surprisingly sincere around the annoyed sarcasm, “But it’s still more her fault than mine.” And the soft, spaced out clicking starts up again with fervor.

“Shouldn’t have taken the jacket!” Eddie sing songs softly, not to reignite the argument, they’re long past that and messily working their way through a mainly ignoring-the-problem based recovery, but to reestablish the casual bullying that they function much more easily under. The other Eddie lets out a particularly wet sounding mockery of her voice and Richie somehow manages to make her fingerspelling clicks sound teasing, and any of the real remains of the argument that had been clinging desperately onto the atmosphere of the small space slowly starts to dissipate.

“It was kinda fucking cool of you, cursing us out and running away, when’d you grow some balls?” The other Eddie admits reluctantly after their bickering has settled and Richie swats roughly at her cheek with her remaining arm from where it’s been sort of pinned in a backwards hug. She signs something Eddie doesn’t understand, either from the warped half view from the mirror or her lack of fluency, but it makes her counterpart snort and drop a kiss into her hair, “Yeah, sure, you’re very cool now. Don’t fucking scare me like that, scare Old Eddie, that’s funny.”

Eddie squawks in offense but it doesn’t really mean anything in the same way the jab hadn’t, there was too much of the relieved good will that came after messily resolved discourse surrounding them for anything to really hit hard enough to hurt.

She looks back on them later, after their conversation had quieted and Eddie has been adequately reassured that even though they don’t know how the fuck it works, that Richie’s arm will be reattached by morning. 

She finds other Eddie asleep, Richie assuming her regular position in her arms, but she looks a little less upset about it than usual. She looks less tired, Eddie finds, snuggled tightly against her girlfriend’s chest, remaining arm toying gently with a frizzy lock of her hair that had fallen in both of their faces. She notices her staring and gives her one of the barely there smiles Eddie’s grown accustomed to, she can’t tell for sure, it’s hard to at a distance, but she’s pretty sure she rolls her eyes.

Eddie thinks she could get used to the idea of them being her kids, she thinks there's the slightest possibility she already has. 

**-**

The second they drive past the California state line, Eddie forgets how to breathe. 

She makes a big, happy deal out of almost reaching their desitinaton, points out the sign and brushes off the kissy noises and teasing from the back. For one incredible, golden moment everything is  _ perfect, _ she’s so close to Richie that she can taste it; but then her lungs lock up in a familiar sort of panic and she isn’t quite sure why.

She turns down the wrong intersection even though the map clearly tells her which one to go through, the kids pick up on it by the time she’s gotten them hopelessly turned around and stuck in a Californian suburb and bully her ruthlessly for it. She checks the directions and takes another wrong turn.

She rolls into too many parking lots to stop too early, too many nights in a row. Every time the other Eddie points out nastily that the sun had barely set and she’d been known to drive until she physically couldn’t keep her eyes open, but she keeps doing it.

She gets genuinely excited once, when her counterpart steals her coffee from the cupholder and dumps the liquid onto the van carpet so she can crunch obnoxiously on the ice. It means she has an excuse to stop again. She doesn’t know why she wants one so bad.

If you asked her why she was suddenly stalling, when all she’d wanted for weeks (longer than weeks, before she’d even returned to Derry, she hadn’t been able to remember Richie but, god, she’d still longed for her, she just hadn’t known what she was longing for) was to get to Richie as fast as she could, she wouldn’t have been able to tell you, honestly, she probably wouldn’t even recognize the extent of which she was doing it.

It’s just that the van suddenly seems too small and the creased printer paper directions seem to map out too short of a distance and everything feels like too much too much too much. 

It’s not intentional, but for the first time since they left Derry, all the doubts she’s kept safely bottled up deep inside of her are bubbling up before she can stop them. 

So instead of dealing with them like an adult, going straight to Richie like she’s been trying to do for weeks and sorting out problems as they happen, she goes the opposite direction and finds a beach.

It’s not hard, they’re in California and it seems like she passes more public stretches of sand and sea than she doesn’t. 

The kids have never seen the ocean, she justifies to herself, they’d probably like it in the same way they liked stars and cloudy skies and trees, all the natural wonders the rest of the population took for granted. She refuses to acknowledge the fact that if that was her only motivation for stalling the inevitable end of their road trip she wouldn’t need to justify it.

The beach has some long name embossed in faded gold on an all but illegibly weathered sign, the kids start up a debate on whether it’s calls Smits Beach or Shits Beach based on the remaining S I and almost entirely worn away TS imprinted in the wood, Eddie quite honestly has a feeling one is far more likely than the other but is entertained enough that she’s not going to butt in. The argument dies out almost immediately at the first sight of a wave crashing against the shoreline.

They both glance back at her, hesitant in a way that she thinks she's been mistranslating as distrustful everytime they’ve done something new, and she leans over to untie her sneakers before nodding.

Richie pauses next to her to unbuckle her mary janes and tuck her knee socks neatly inside of them (her feet aren’t segmented like her hands are, no definition between where her toes should be, it’s weird and Eddie finds she can’t look at it for too long. It’s one of those uncomfortable reminders that these kids  _ aren’t human at all _ that makes her stomach feel funny). Her counterpart shows no such care, tugging the first converse off without untying it, which really only ends with her tumbled ass over tea kettle in the sand, one shoe in hand with half the tongue separated from the rubber toe. Richie laughs at her and then, far more helpful than Eddie who is doubled over with how hard she’s cackling, kneels down to untie and tug off the second shoe. She pulls down her mask and nuzzles her nose gently into her hair to get the scowl off her face, which feels far too fond and kiss-like of a gesture for Eddie to be watching, and then they take off down to the water with their hands tightly clasped.

They pause for just a moment, shifting hesitantly from foot to foot until the undertow slowly starts to drag Richie’s negligible weight forward and the other Eddie yanks her knee deep into the ocean before the ocean can do it for her.

Richie glances back, waving her over, and Eddie shakes her head, sitting down in the sand and pretending to ignore the hushed, lowered hand conversation that passes between the two the second they think she's not looking.

It’s all achingly familiar in a way she can pretend is peaceful, if she can ignore the worry compressing her lungs and the crash of the waves. With her eyes squeezed shut and the sun beating down on her face and the kids shrieking in the water as they have a splash fight fully clothed she is practically overwhelmed with the nostalgia of summer afternoons spent in Derry, Maine’s quarry. Eventually it's too much, thinking about her Losers,  _ her Richie, _ and she has to open her eyes. She doesn’t know if it makes the ache in her chest lessen or grow when she looks and all the images of Bill and Bev chicken fighting Mike and Ben while Richie and Stan splash eachother in the distance shrink back into two little monsters playing in the California ocean.

Richie swipes her leg behind her girlfriend’s knee, sending her fully toppling into the wave with a cut off, spluttered curse before her head ducks fully underwater. She surfaces just long enough to shout something incoherent and amusedly accusatory before yanking Richie under with her.

They don’t come up right away, and her mind quickly stutters away from amusement, overwhelmed with images of Richie, hollow and aimless, floating out to sea while Eddie, weighted with black slime, sinks to the bottom of the ocean. 

She wants to call them in, get up and drag them onto shore herself to make sure they’re safe, but she’s barely standing when she realizes quite how much she sounds like her mother. She’s slammed herself back into the sand so quickly she leaves a dent in the dune, tring to remind herself that neither of them really need to breathe, so they’re probably fine.

The kids break the water eventually, Richie maskless and the other Eddie’s cheeks flushed a pale, gray-purple, their arms tangled together so they’re anchored against the other’s chest. Eddie sort of wants to heckle them for underwater kissing, or whatever the fuck you do when your partners lips are stitched shut, its cliche and stupid and easy to tease, but it still feels awkward to acknowlege their relationship when they’re not only children but her and her best friend as children.

She doesn't realize how late it's getting, not until the sun sinks low below the horizon, washing the whole world an uncomfortably bright gold that melts into a cherry-cough-drop red by the time she calls the kids back and they actually listen to her. 

At first the other Eddie swipes a wall of water uselessly in her direction, looking slightly put out when it doesn’t manage to reach past the ten feet of sand to splash her. Richie just sinks under the water until she’s submerged up to eye level, one brow cocked cautiously like she’s testing their newly developed dynamic that had appeared after she had broken and run away, challenging her new limits surrounding the very idea of disobedience. 

She had just flopped back, calling them fuckers and more or less missing the all but conspiratorial look they shared at her expense. The other Eddie scooped her girlfriend up out of the sea bridal style, both toppling back underwater when Richie tried to wriggle and thrash her way out of the hold. Eventually they managed their way out, the same way they’d gone in, hand and hand, though, with less enthusiasm this time around.

Eddie goes to stand, focus set on their smudge of a shoe pile by the entrance, it’s really a wonder no one else has wandered into the same area and tripped over them, it almost makes a spark of anxiety flare up somewhere in her stomach that they’re somewhere they aren’t supposed to be efore she remembers they’re leaving. Or, she  _ thinks _ they’re leaving before her counterpart flicks her squarely in the center of her forehead with her free hand and stands on her toes, towering over her.

Richie doesn’t stand over her quite the same, pausing close enough that she doesn’t need to let go of her girlfriend’s hand as she shakes what seems like an absurd amount of ocean water out of the gaps at her knee joints.

“Oh, fuck, yeah… hollow.” Eddie thinks, only realizing that she’d muttered it out loud when Richie offers her a huffed laugh and a spray of salty water from her wrist.

“Yeah, haha, hollow. Why the fuck are we here?” Her counterpart cuts in before they can fall into another round of ‘Eddie gets more and more distrubed as the kids mock her with their inhumanness’, she does it so quickly it almost seems practiced.

“I thought you’d like it, I mean, it’s one of those cool things that-”

“I can fucking read, I know we’re in  _ California _ ,” It’s still weird, how they say normal things like states the same way one would talk about the  _ Starship Enterprise _ if someone told you they’d acutally built it, “You said your Richie was in Caifornia, so why are we stopping at beaches and shit? Why aren’t we going directly to your Richie.” 

It wasn’t a question, though most of her questions were phrased like demands, like she’d never learned how to ask for things, like jackets, like half full cups of iced coffee, like  _ answers, _ before expecting to get them.

Despite all that Eddie doesn’t want to answer her. She honestly doesn’t even know if she can, when she really thinks about it her chest gets tight and her brain sort of shorts out. She doesn’t  _ know  _ why they haven't been driving nonstop to Richie now that they're so close.

The real answer, the one she doesn’t want to accept, is that she’s scared. She’s always has been scared and she always will be scared, it doesn’t matter if Rachel fucking Tozier held her hands in a disgusting, clown infested sewer and told her she was brave; Derry and her mother and the word dyke scrawled across bathroom stalls took something from her, ripped it right out, it’s spot in her lungs replaced with useless puffs of corticosteroid. She’s always going to be scared.

She still believes Richie, in the desperate, lost puppy way she’s always believed Richie, even though it made her friends call her gullible and more often than not got her in trouble. Richie called her brave. So maybe she is, so fucking what? 

Bravery didn’t mean shit because bravery and fear were two entirely different things regardless of what other people tried to tell you.   
Stan was brave and Stan slit her wrists in a bathtub. Bev was brave and Bev was stuck in a relationship with the female version of her father. Eddie was brave and Eddie was hiding out from the same woman who told her that at a shitty beach two hours from her house. 

The same woman who told her that she was brave and then watched her die. Richie watched her die and thinks she's dead and never signed up for long term with a corpse.

Friends tell their friend’s they're brave in life or death circumstances, they hold their hands when it becomes obvious the life half of life or death has been speared straight through with a massive, clawed leg. 

Richie could have just thought of Eddie as a friend, could  _ still  _ just think of Eddie as a friend.

And now she’s driving thousands of miles, wearing her jacket, straight to her front door to confess her love and she has a sick feeling its going to end one of two ways: Eddie with her heart broken or Richie kissing back because she’s too fucking nice to break the heart of her used to be dead best friend.

Pity isn’t love, at least not the kind Eddie wants, the kind she fucking craves. She wants Richie, wholly and fully, but this whole time she’s been too preoccupied with getting to her that she never once considered if Richie will be capable of giving her what she wants. Eddie doesn’t want to force the woman she loves into one big, uncomfortable favor, a relationship that feels more like a constant guilt trip. Eddie had that, with her mother, with Myran, she knew intimately what it was like to be in a relationship because she felt obligated to. It fucking sucked.

She doesn’t know how to explain it, even as the dread and anxiety washes over her, freezing into her bones like barely melted ice, she can’t  _ breathe why can’t she breathe? _

“I’m not avoiding my Richie.” She chokes instead, defensive even though there's really no need to be.

“I never said you were. I just asked why the fuck we weren’t going to her-”

“It was  _ implied.”  _ The kid kicks a toeful of sand at her, smirking in a way Eddie doesn’t recognize, soft at the corners and concerned in her eyes.

“It’s a bad idea to ignore your Richie. They don’t like it.” Richie elbows her hard in the side, the sea water stuck in the limbs sloshing loudly over her girlfriend’s protest. The other Eddie leans in to poke her cheek with her tongue but instead licking a line up Richie’s hand when she palms her face and turns her back to Eddie. She realizes with sobering clarity that they had discussed her, this was a planned emotional intervention.

“I’m  _ fine.” _

“Literally just fucking tell us why you’re being weird!” Richie’s elbow made a reappearance in her partner’s side, said partner scrunching up her nose in poorly contained frustration.

_ You O-K? _

Richie somehow manages to crumple her exasperation into something softer as she signs the question, tilting her head and offering Eddie an almost smile.

To her absolute horror, she realizes her cheeks feel hot, eyes burning in the way they only do when she’s about to cry, and goddamn, does she start to cry. 

Whole body shaking, throat burning, hiccuping like a little kid sobs that she just lets take over her body; she doesn’t really have a choice in the matter and it’s almost cathartic, letting herself submit to the horrifying ideal of showing so much of her explosive negative emotion. 

She deserves it, honestly, she’s held out far longer than anyone should be expected to in her situation, except for the times, curled around herself and weeping quietly into the collar of her Richie’s jacket when she is pretending to sleep, those moments that she doesn’t think should count, those moments where the kids either don’t notice or are at least gracious enough to ignore her. 

They don’t ignore her now, as she flops her damp face into her hands; she can’t see them but it isn't hard to picture the way other Eddie’s face almost subconsciously splits into a condescending smirk as she snorts, it’s easy to correlate the dull clank followed by cursing with Richie stomping on her girlfriend’s foot to tell her to shut up.

She looks up from the slightly reassuring darkness of her palms when she feels someone sit too close next to her, Richie, if the quiet but constant grinding clicks that come with having both setience and ball joints is anything to go by. She offers her an incredibly forced quirk of her lips before wrapping her arm over her back and tapping a too sharp beat into her arm, leaning her head against Eddie’s shoulder. It’s all very awkward, like she’s trying to follow some official comfort routine step by step even though she’s never actually put it in practice before, but it’s sort of reassuring in the way gentle physical contact with another person is after just a little too long without it.

The other Eddie, looking utterly baffled but still clinging just a little to her frustration at Eddie for not opening up in a helpless sort of way, like she isn’t sure where to put it, plops down next to her in the sand, not quite as close, not trying to touch her.

She’d have expected Richie to do the same, she wasn’t as physically forthright with herself in the way both the Eddie’s were. She didn’t really offer herself up to be touched, her girlfriend grabs her a lot but she doesn’t really have much to do with that decision making process, all of which was fair considering people could literally break her with ease. But she had sat next to Eddie, held herself against her without prompting when she started to cry and it makes her feel like, if she’s done anything this trip, at least she got this one kid to trust her. 

She realizes, perhaps a little later than she should have, that Richie is just mirroring their positions from when she ran away and Eddie had held her while she ‘cried’. It’d worked for her and now that Eddie needed comfort she wanted to return the favor the way she had been taught how; it makes Eddie cry harder.

By the time she calms herself down enough to stop sniveling into her hands the other Eddie has shifted her position so she’s sprawled out, half sitting in the sand in front of her, she looks somewhat horrified and entirely uncomfortable but she’s clearly trying to hide it behind a cocked eyebrow and what might have passed as a smirk a week ago.

Richie pats her succinctly twice on the shoulder and unwinds her arm from around her back, holding her hands anxiously in her lap like she isn’t sure where to go from here. 

“Sorry.” She chokes, embarrassed over how thickly it comes out even though they’ve  _ just _ seen her cry her eyes out. The kids make awkward eye contact over her, a silent conversation her eyes are a little too unfocused to pick up on, the other Eddie’s smirk droops.

“Richie would like to know whats wrong.” She says it like she would also like to know whats wrong but she’s confused about why, like she’s completely torn between being amused at her distress and worried about it.

“I’m  _ fine.” _

“No, your fucking not. No one cries like that if they’re fine. Asshole.” It’d be a nice sentiment if she wasn’t so hell bent on not making it one, even so the insult at the end sounds sort of like an after thought, like the concern is subconsciously winning her battle against her innate longing to be an dick and she isn’t happy about it.

“It’s… I’m just worried my Richie won’t want to see me… what if she doesn’t  _ like me?” _ It sounds achingly juvenile when she says it like that, pulling petals off a flower to see if her fourth grade school yard crush loves her-loves her not. She doesn’t think she can reword it to get her point across better without crying again, if she gets into everything thats been eating her up inside she might just break and not be able to drag herself back together. It explained the base issue, if anything, Richie might not… like her, like her and it’s a possibility she needs to prepare for.

“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Richie, she’s fucking hopeless. She’s so fucking stupid, there isn’t anything we can do here.” The other Eddie flops back on the sand and slams an arm dramtically over her face, Richie rolls her eyes but her glance at Eddie afterwards shows she really doesn’t disagree. Something defensive sparks among her inner panic.

“Look! You two don’t fucking understand! She could have moved on, she could have never felt like that for me in the first place, I don’t know! I died before we could talk about that shit! I could tell her I love her and she could be grossed out! I… I don’t fucking know! I-” She talks with her hands, open palmed and flying because she has nowhere else to put her energy if she doesn’t want to cry again.

Richie grabs her hand before it can hit her in the face, segmented fingers tighter than expected around her palm as she yanks it into her lap, only releasing it when she’s sure Eddie’s looking at her so she can sign. It’s rapidfire and pointed and Eddie doesn’t catch a second of it.

She glances back to her counterpart helplessly, hoping for even the barest bones of a translation and half expecting her to still be flopped back, too preoccupied with shaming Eddie for being ‘an idiot’ to watch what her girlfriend is trying to say. 

Much to her surprise, and somewhat annoyance, she’s clearly entirely enamored with what Richie’s saying, she’s even mouthing phrases as they happen. Eddie is about to call her out on it before she realizes that her cheeks have taken on the dark purple pallor that tends to mean, for lack of a better word, that she’s blushing. Her knees are hugged tight to her chest and eventually she buries her face into them. 

Eddie reaches out to jab a finger into her side and she snaps her head up, whole face now flushed magenta and looking terribly embarrassed about it. Richie drops her hands into her lap, looking disgruntled at being ignored before her face splits into something concerningly mischievous, drawing one hand to her lips and bringing it out, Eddie almost asked why she signed  _ thank you _ before realizing, with just as much confusion, that she was blowing her a kiss.

“What?” She manages weakly as her counterpart reburies her face away and flips them both off.

“She was… she called you a dipshit,” Is the extent of her muffled reply.

“She definitely said more than that.”

“Yeah well that's the only part I’m translating!” She shouts, looking up, it seems. to solely show how annoyed she is. Richie’s lips perk into the closest thing to a shit eating grin Eddie’s seen from her, she cradles her arms, swinging them lightly to call her girlfriend a  _ baby _ which Eddie happily translates.

_ “Fine! _ She said you need to stop being stupid, and, um, that when she woke up for the first time… the only thing she knew was that she was completely in love with me. And, um, she thinks part of the reason I’m her favorite person is because you were  _ your  _ Richie’s favorite person in a… romantic way so that's why she was scared of it. She also said you should pull your head out of your ass because she wouldn’t.... adore me if your Richie didn’t adore you.”

Eddie realizes delightedly that she isn’t annoyed, she’s  _ flustered. _ It’s almost adorable, the way she normally plays completely disgusted over the very idea of a blatant sappy love confession but when she actually gets one she’s melted into a blushing, intarticulate puddle.

The shiny venerer of teasing a shitty little teenager in love fades quickly once she actually processes what had been said. (Not that there was much footing there anyway, what was she going to do, tease her for beng in a healthier relationship than Eddie’s ever had before?)

It makes some sort of logical sense that these kids are dating both because Eddie was terrified of her subconscious crush on Richie  _ and _ Richie was terrified of her crush on Eddie, but she can’t really process it. Before she might have disregarded it, said the relationship was one sided and this Richie was just easily manipulated, but she knows now that isn’t the case and she isn’t quite sure how to handle that.

“Oh.”

“Yeah. So stop being stupid.” She forces her to make eye contact, raising one eyebrow like she’s issuing a challenge despite the color still brushed up to the tips of her ears. Eddie doesn’t think she fully believes her, doesn’t think that's even a possibility until she sees Richie and hears it straight from her mouth herself, and even then she might have doubts. But it’s a start, and right now a start is all Eddie can hope for, so she grabs it and holds on tightly. It almost feels like hope.

“Okay. Okay, okay, okay. Thanks, guys.” Richie leans hard against her side, a cold, somewhat grounding reassurance before standing up with a damp sounding creak and informing Eddie that she should  _ suck it up, we go  _ before turning and walking over to their shoes.

“You heard her. Get ready, you fucking stupid lesbian, we’re going whether you like it or not.” Her counterpart doesn’t offer her a hand when she stand, kicking sand hard at her legs once more for good measure and walking past her.

“Fine! We’ll go tomorrow though, it’s too late now.” It’s not, it’s barely seven, Richie is only a few hours away and it’s not like she’d ever been an early to bed early to rise kind of person, but as surprisingly reassuring as Richie’s speech was, despite the less than impassioned translation, she doesn’t think she’s ready, not just yet.

“You’re a pussy!” The other Eddie sing songs over her shoulder before jogging up to swoop up her girlfriend, from where she’s bent over buckling her first shoe, laughing out something about revenge as Richie kicks her bare foot in the air.

Tomorrow. She just needs to mentally prepare herself to see the love of her life, confess that lifelong love, ask for a place to live, and tell her that they had two children together when they were twelve, they just didn’t know it by tomorrow. She’s fucked.

“Are you coming?” The kids turn to look at her. Richie is flopped over Eddie’s shoulder, arms full of sneakers and a single mary jane, she tilts her head, readjusting her armful of shoes to sign with more confidence than Eddie thinks she’s ever felt:  _ You O-K. _

Okay, maybe she isn’t fucked, not if this kid seems so convinced she’s alright.

She concedes to the fact that, perhaps, she’s simply just  _ screwed _ and follows them down the little path to the van.

**-**

It’s just a door. Eddie’s seen a lot of doors in her lifetime, a plethora of them, one could say, hundreds of thousands of millions of doors, so she’s on pretty good authority that the one in front of her is incredibly unremarkable, just a board covered in chipped red paint with a dingy gold knob. There is really nothing about this door that makes it any different from all the other doors that she’s knocked on before. Nothing different except for the fact that this door has Richie Tozier behind it.

Richie Tozier who Eddie has been in love with since she was thirteen, Richie Tozier who Eddie died for, Richie Tozier who could always understand her, comfort her, make her laugh even when everything was terrible. Richie Tozier who Eddie had driven over 3107.6 miles for.

And now she can’t bring herself to knock on her door.

_ “Hurry up!”  _ She whirls back to the van where the kids promised to wait so she could have a moment with Richie to, as the other Eddie put it, be gross, sappy old lesbians.

Richie pokes her head over the top of the open door, teetering on tip toes to shoot her a far more supportive thumbs up.

She turns back to the door, taking one final moment to take in it’s worn red varnish and rattly old doorknob and how it feels like so much more of a barrier between her and Richie than the miles ever had.

And she knocks.

Nothing happens for a moment, which seems wildly anticlimactic. Rationally Eddie knows that Richie needs time to process that someone knocked, go down the stairs, and unlock the door, but rationality seems wrong for this situation. It feels like Richie should be waiting behind the door to swing it open immediately and embrace Eddie, some romantic movie bullshit.

But this isn’t a romance movie, this is whatever boring bullshit happens after a particularly sick horror movie plays out if it’s anything. She sort of wants to knock again, slam on the door until Richie gets the message because part of her doesn’t think she’s going to fully believe that things are okay until Richie Tozier is a tangible person right in front of her that she can actually see and hold.

Before she can actually lift her hand to knock the door opens. It opens and Eddie forgets how to breathe again.

_ “Richie.”  _ The word spills out of her mouth before she can even think about it, before she can really think about anything other than the fact that it’s  _ her. _

She looks rough, is the first thing Eddie thinks. The second thing she thinks is that is probably not what she should be thinking after  _ coming back from the dead  _ and then immediately driving thousands of miles to confess her love for her childhood crush, it should probably be something more romantic. If this was some sort of romance novel or movie she probably would have waxed poetic over the way the watery early morning sunlight makes her eyes sparkle or some fucking bullshit, but she’s already established this isn’t one of those movies and there is just something about her, exhausted and broken shining dully through the purple circles bruised into the thin skin under her eyes and the tense lines of her slumped shoulders, it’s all muted and wrong and Eddie doesn’t fucking get it. 

Part of her just wants to grab her by the shoulders and make her tell her whats wrong so she can fucking fix it. This isn’t right, Richie is supposed to be  _ okay, _ but still, a small, sick part of her is almost relieved. Richie hadn’t moved on. It’s not that she wanted her to be mourning for months, she didn’t want her to be even slightly sad  _ ever, _ but she’s selfish and as much as people preach that their dead loved ones would want them to move on with their lives, she doesn’t want to be forgotten. But that doesn’t mean Richie looking so terrible doesn’t make her want to scream at the wrongness. Dying and coming back to life was apparently just a mess of contraditorary emotions.

She wonders, absently, if Richie is thinking the same thing about her and how terrible she looks, it’s not like her wet wipe and gas station sink showers combined with her too few hours of sleep on the floor of a van that was either slimy or lumpy from residual monster kid goo hid much about how stressed and gross she was.

“How… what-  _ Eddie? _ ” She doesn’t think she’s ever heard her name said like that, like it's the only thing that matters in the whole world.

She had been planning what she was going to say when she first saw Richie since Nevada; how she loved her and she was sorry for leaving her, how she wants to be with her if she’ll have her, how she’d marry her right now on the spot if she asked because, if she’s being honest, thinking of Richie is the only thing that got her through the past few weeks.

But, unfortunately, because Eddie Kaspbrak is the worst person ever born, the kind of person whose last words to the love of her life were ‘I fucked your mom’, she doesn’t say any of that. Instead what she says is: “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Richie chokes on a laugh, unexpected and cracking around the edges, an ugly thing that Eddie loves more than anything, before she bursts into tears. Somehow in the million ways Eddie had expected this reunion to go, Richie  _ crying _ somehow hadn’t really crossed her mind. It made sense, Eddie could feel  _ herself _ tearing up and she had known she was alive, but it almost made her feel more guilty, you know, for getting murdered.

“Are you real?”

“Of course I’m real, dipshit what kind of a question is that?”

“No, but you’re  _ dead! _ I watched you fucking die! I… I… what the  _ fuck?  _ I… I thought I was awake but… but you’re  _ here-” _ Her hands are shaking hard as she brings one up and pinches a sharp, red crescent in her wrist, Eddie reaches out and catches her hand before she can do it again.

“Death didn’t really... stick, but I promise… it’s me, I’m real, it’s me, I’m  _ sorry.” _ She wishes her voice hadn’t cracked, it seems to minimize some of the emotional stability of the whole situation, she squeezes Richie’s hand and releases it. 

Theres a moment of silence where Richie just stares at her, head tilted like a confused puppy trying to figure out the world’s most complicated equation, and then, she leans in.

In retrospect, it’s obviously for a hug, what with the way her arms are held out in the most hug like position possible and her focus is no where near Eddie’s lips, but her face is so very close and this is all Eddie has been wanting since she woke up so, whether it’s an intentional choice to misinterpret the action or not, she lurches forward and smashes her lips against Richie’s.

It wasn't a good kiss by any means, close lipped and desperate and one half of the two it takes to kiss tries to pulls away at first because she still isn’t convinced the other isn’t just another late night hallucination of the woman she loved and lost brutally. Honestly, if you looked it up a textbook definition bad kiss probably tastes like salt because you’re both crying and smells like the molding interior of an ancient van and stale ocean water. ‘Good’ kisses most likely aren’t haunted by the past and present and the sudden, all consuming, crushing relief that you might get a future together. All that being said, it is the best kiss Eddie has ever had in her entire life.

“Holy shit.” Richie chokes, breaking away from the kiss, but her fingers had come up and wrapped tightly around Eddie’s wrist and she doesn’t seem keen on letting it go.

“Fuck. Was that okay? I probaby should have asked but I just thought, I mean obviously you didn’t hate it becuase you kissed back but still-” Richie kisses her. It’s quicker than the first, more of a peck, honestly, sweet and tentative and slightly amused, Eddie feels startlingly like she’s just been beeped.

“This is real?” Richie asks again, leaning her forehead against Eddie’s, but it feels less like a question this time and more like a desprate grab at confirmation. 

“Yeah, yeah this is real. We’re okay.” She isn’t sure this time who she’s reassuring more, this is all going so much better than she could have anticipated and normally, in the life of Eddie Kaspbrak, that’s when things go wrong.

_ “Are you  _ **_done yet?_ ** _ ” _ The other Eddie calls whinily from the back of the van. There it is. Richie tenses against her, looking over her head with a somewhat justified amount of confusion. It probably isn’t helpful that Eddie leans her forehead against her shoulder, groaning loud to cover up her laughter.

“What the fuck was that?” 

She was so worried about letting Richie know she loved her, she’d just figured everything else that comes afterwards would be easy in comparison. However, she’d kissed Richie pretty goddamn easily and now she just feels stupid not planning more how she’s going to introduce Richie to two monster children that, from what the kids had filled her in on, she’d last seen at age twelve in a murder house as a means to terrify her. 

“Um, well, we… had kids together.” That was absolutely not the way to present it, she knows that even before she looks at Richie’s hopelessly perplexed face, “Well, I mean, you had a kid and I had a kid, they’re, like, dating, they aren’t siblings, that’d be gross.”

_ “Thats not helping!” _ Her counterpart calls and she turns quickly to see the other Eddie swinging half off the van door, the other Richie peeking out from behind her legs. They’re clearly eavesdropping and she can feel a blush, red hot and slightly embarrassed, start to spread to the tips of her ears at the thought of how much they’d heard,  _ “Hi, old, human Richie!” _

Richie laughs, but it’s less amused and more like she’s choked, bewildered and slightly worried; it all sort of manages to sound like she’s convinced she’s losing it.

“Hi? That’s you… that’s  _ me but- _ what the  _ fuck?” _ Eddie snorts sympathetically, squeezing Richie’s hand and waving the kids up; her counterpart leaping off the door and accidentally landing atop her girlfriend, sending them both toppling into the little grass sidebar of Richie’s walkway.

“Maybe we should go inside? We have a lot of shit to discuss.”

  
  
  
  


_ Six months later _

Eddie wakes up to a crash down the hall, a loud echoed metallic clang that rattles through the locked bedroom door, cut off with a particularly loud  _ oh fuck _ . It’s not exactly a welcome noise by any means, but it is certainly not anything that hasn’t happened before. 

_ “Nooo.” _ Richie’s groan vibrates through her collarbone, face having nestled to what seems to be it’s natural position, in the crook of Eddie’s neck, at some point during the night. She presses a kiss to the same place, which is usually her cue that she’s going to get up, but to Eddie’s unwitting delight she keeps her eyes firmly shut and arms wrapped tightly around her girlfriend’s waist.

“It’s your turn.” It’s not what she really meant to say, it sort of just spills out with her complete and total reluctance to get up.

“ _ Good morning, Richie. How’d ya sleep, Richie? I love you, Richie.” _ She grumbles, blinking disgruntled up at Eddie, sleep softened and squinty. Eddie can’t help swooping down to kiss her forehead, she’s practically asking for her to do so, it’d be rude not to. 

(If she’s being honest, it’s more for Eddie than Richie anyway. She could kiss Richie and write it off as self care, brag about it to her therapist later.)

“Good morning, Richie. How did you sleep, Richie? I love you, Richie. It’s your turn to deal with the kids.” Richie closes her eyes again, dropping her head back into Eddie’s shoulder.

“I can’t, m’sleeping.” 

“Are you?”

“Mhm.” She nuzzles her nose against Eddie’s shoulder, making halfhearted snoring noises like she’s proving her point that she shouldn’t need to get out of bed.

It’s more convincing than Eddie would like to admit, but that might have more to do with how hopelessly in love she is with the woman than her less than stellar performance.

They’d both gotten softer around the edges since getting together. Eddie had never quite had control of her diet, her mother and Myran had liked keeping her small and the pills that actually served any real purpose tended to make her weight fluctuate between light and lighter. Richie had been some awkwardly maintained thinness, something a little too fake, hovering over the beauty standard by a single, incredibly unhealthy thread. When Eddie outright asked her about it she’d simply shot finger guns in her direction and informed her that ‘it’s showbiz, baby!’ which was not nearly as reassuring as she thinks it is.

But their relationship was something different, it wasn’t pills and talent agencies and emotional warfare, it was something supportive rather than something controlling and slowly but surely it was changing them both for the better. 

While Eddie understands that there are significant mental and physical health benefits to this change, she can’t help but think the most important result was that it made cuddling significantly more comfortable. Eddie thinks she could lay like this forever, Richie’s warmth held firmly against her chest in her arms, happy and lazy; soft around the edges.

But they were woken by a crash and that means someone needs to go check and see if anything important is broken, an unspoken rule enforced after a particularly unfortunate misunderstanding featuring the late Wentworth Tozier D.D.S and his unassuming urn no longer resting in peace on the mantle. The kids don’t really have a great understanding of what is breakable and, more importantly, what breakable objects have real consequences when actually broken. Richie and Eddie can’t really fault them for it but they don’t have much of an excuse not to be on the ball with checking up on them.

“ _ You _ should go check on  _ your _ strays.” Eddie knows she is fully kidding, a weak, whiny excuse to try and stay in bed for a little longer, but it doesn’t stop her from soundly flicking the back of her head.

“I have it on pretty good authority that at least one of  _ our _ strays is definitely your fault, so… up and attem, baby.” Richie sits up, tugging her sleep shirt down over her knees as she stretches forward, the garden gnome across it’s front awkwardly elongated over her knees until Eddie swats her calf and tells her to stop stalling.

She mourns the loss of her girlfriend’s comfortable warmth, but she grins up at her anyway as she leaves, blowing a kiss to the disgruntled middle finger aimed in her direction.

_ “Hey! Slimer, Venkman, what the fuck was that?” _ She snorts, burrowing comfortably under the blankets, well aware that she’s not going to be able to get anymore sleep after being awake this long, after a couple more minutes the boredom and general awareness of her Richie and her kids just down the hall will get to her and she’ll get up to join them anyway.

Part of her still doesn’t believe that she gets to have this.

This slanted view of domescitity where she gets to cuddle with Richie and kiss her and watch her fuck around with their kids, where nothing is the shiny-plastic false-perfect like Myran had tried to maintain, it’s real and sloppy and messy and Eddie loves every fucking minute of it.

In a couple minutes she’ll get up and lean against the kitchen island while the kids do a poor job cleaning up their mess and Richie pretends to fuck with them but not-so-secretly helps them out. In a couple minutes Eddie will make three cups of coffee, one black, one with six sugars and the tiniest bit of milk, and one that isn‘t coffee at all but just a mug full of ice cubes, becuase, even though she won’t say so, the younger Eddie likes to be included. In a couple of minutes Richie will lean against her side and press a kiss to her temple and start to make breakfast. 

But for right now she’s content to snuggle under the comforter for a little longer, to wrap herself around Richie’s pillow and close her eyes against the watery early morning sunlight.

For right now she’s content to just be happy, not that it’s difficult, not anymore.

Richie and the kids laughter, the echo of porcelin hands slamming excitedly on the marble countertop followed by a slew of enthusiastic curses, filters down the hall, bright and loud and delighted. 

No, she thinks, all warm and comfortable and unafraid, being happy isn’t difficult at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We did it!!! They're a full family now!!! Woohoo!!!   
> They are the worst little travel companions and Eddie is their MOM and Richie is ALSO THEIR MOM NOW and they get a DOG and they're the BEST FAMILY EVER WHO I LOVE  
> This fic was very fucking fun to write and honestly these characters probably aren't gone forever becuase I adore these nasty little monsters!  
> Thank you once again to @haaaawaiianshirt on Tumblr she's great go follow her and also we literally wrote a Whole sequel in the comments of the last chapter if you want to read that

**Author's Note:**

> @haaaawaiianshirt on Tumblr is honestly who you have to thank for this fic existing, her art and ideas about it and also just in general? Absolutley Top Notch, she's an icon  
> Anyway this fic is really just for me and like two other people on Tumblr but I think it's fun


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